The Opium Wars’ Most Terrifying Torture Methods

In 1800, approximately 4,000 chests of opium moved annually through the Bengal trade routes into Chinese waters. By 1838, that figure had risen to 40,000. Each chest weighed approximately 60 kg. The arithmetic is simple. In four decades, the tonnage of narcotic flooding into a single empire had increased tenfold.

What the ledgers did not record, what no ledger could, was the experience of Chen A-hook, a rice farmer from Guangdong province whose name appears in an 1836 memorial to the Daoguang Emperor submitted by provincial governor Deng Tingzhen. Deng described a man who had sold his land, his tools, and finally his children’s winter clothing to purchase the drug his body demanded.

Deng wrote that the province contained men so lost to shame that they lay in the gutters of their own villages, their limbs without purpose, their faces like wax. The East India Company’s 1838 annual report, produced in the same year, described the Bengal opium harvest as having achieved a satisfactory expansion consistent with the principles of commercial development.

Lin Weixi was 23 years old when British merchant sailors killed him in the village of Tsim Sha Tsui in early July 1839. The sailors, drunk on rice liquor, having come ashore from a ship moored in Kowloon Harbor, had fallen into a brawl with local men that ended with Lin dead in the street. British Superintendent of Trade Charles Elliot ordered the two most implicated sailors detained and convened a trial aboard a warship in the Pearl River, appointing merchant captains as his jurors and himself as judge.

Commissioner Lin Zexu demanded the men be surrendered to Chinese legal authority, writing in an official dispatch:

“No principle of justice permits the murderer to be judged by those who travel with him.”

Elliot’s reply, preserved in the Foreign Office archives in London, stated that surrendering British subjects to Chinese courts would expose them to a punishment of death applied without proper jurisprudential form.

The sailors received fines and brief imprisonment from Elliot’s shipboard tribunal. The verdict was later overturned entirely by a London court on the grounds that Elliot had exceeded his jurisdiction. Lin Weixy received no further mention in British diplomatic correspondence. By 1839, Commissioner Lin Zexu, appointed by the Daoguang Emperor with sweeping powers to extirpate the opium trade at Canton, had identified over 10,000 addicts in Guangzhou province alone.

The figure appeared in intelligence reports he compiled before his arrival, but his own investigators later revised it upward. Lin moved with the methodical certainty of a man who believed the arithmetic spoke for itself. If the supply were eliminated, the suffering would cease. He arrested more than 1,700 Chinese opium dealers, confiscated over 70,000 opium pipes, and then turned to the foreign warehouses where the source material sat in numbered chests.

Over 23 days beginning on June 3rd, 1839, 500 laborers under Lin’s supervision destroyed 20,283 chests and 200 sacks of opium, approximately 1,000 long tons of the drug, on the banks of the Pearl River outside Humen Town. They mixed it with salt and lime in excavated trenches and flushed it into the sea.

Lin wrote afterward to Queen Victoria, a letter that never reached her, insisting:

“I proceed to issue my commands to the foreign merchants, deliver up to the government every particle of the opium on board their store ships, that it may be burned and destroyed, and that thus the evil may be entirely extirpated.”

The cargo destroyed at Humen had been valued at approximately 2 million pounds sterling. The indemnity China would be forced to pay after the subsequent war totaled 21 million silver dollars, more than 10 times that value. What the East India Company understood, and what the Daoguang Emperor did not, was that opium was no longer merely a commodity.

By 1839, the drug accounted for 40% of the total value of Indian exports. The Bengal opium harvest funded the Royal Navy’s maintenance contracts in the South China Sea. It subsidized the tea that filled British drawing rooms. It paid, indirectly, for the steamships that would be used to destroy the Chinese fleet.

A company memo from 1837, cited by historian W. T. Haynes III, noted that:

“The discontinuation of the Bengal trade in opium would occasion a deficit in Indian revenue of such severity as cannot be contemplated without alarm.”

Howqua, the Cantonese merchant known formerly as Wu Bingjian, and described by Western traders as the wealthiest man in the world, had spent decades navigating the gap between the emperor’s prohibitions and the foreigners’ demands.

His warehouse had burned to the ground in 1822 under disputed circumstances. He rebuilt it. When Lin Zexu summoned the Cohong merchants in March 1839 and accused them of complicity, threatening to execute two if the foreign merchants failed to surrender their stocks, Howqua walked between the competing powers carrying messages both sides already knew would not be accepted.

He told Lin’s subordinates:

“The foreigners cannot be moved by threats. They have been trained not to hear.”

Three months later, his entire trading system was engulfed in a war that neither side had precisely planned over a substance that one side considered commerce and the other considered poison. The Nemesis arrived off the Pearl River in November 1839 and the Chinese soldiers stationed at the Bogue Forts had never seen anything like it. It was an iron-hulled paddle steamer drawing only 5 ft of water, shallow enough to navigate rivers that had never hosted warships, and it carried two 32-lb pivot guns and five 6-pounders.

The Chinese war junks that came out to meet it were built on designs dating to the 15th century. At the second battle of Chuenpi on January 7th, 1841, the Nemesis and the assembled Royal Navy fleet destroyed 11 junks and captured the human forts with British casualties recorded at 38 men wounded and none killed.

The Chinese Southern Fleet under Admiral Guan Tianpei, a man who had spent four years reinforcing those same forts in anticipation of exactly this attack, was effectively annihilated in a single morning. Guan Tianpei did not survive. He had, according to the account of British naval officer William Hutcheon Hall, writing in 1844’s Narrative of the Voyages and Services of the Nemesis, continued to direct fire from the battlements as his positions were overrun and was found dead there.

Hall described him as lying among his guns with something of the dignity of a soldier. The British report on the engagement described its outcome as a salutary demonstration of the superiority of modern naval science. The city of Dinghai on Zhoushan Island, fell on July 5th, 1840, after an intense naval bombardment that lasted a matter of hours.

Its civilian population of approximately 600,000 people had watched from the shore as the fleet assembled. The garrison commander, Zhang Chaofa, sent a message requesting the British explain their purpose in attacking an island that had conducted no hostile act against them. The reply that came back, if any came at all, has not survived in the official record.

What survives is the account of the occupation that followed. By autumn of 1840, disease had broken out in the Dinghai garrison. Of the 3,300 men who had originally occupied the island, fewer than 1,900 remained capable of fighting by the beginning of 1841. Malaria, dysentery, and fever killed more British soldiers than Chinese arms had.

A junior officer named Lieutenant Ouchterlony, serving with the Bengal Volunteers, wrote in his published memoir of the campaign that the hospitals at Dinghai were places where men were laid in rows and left to liquefy, with no physician present and no medicine sufficient. The British field report submitted to the War Office in London for the same period described the Dinghai garrison as maintaining adequate operational readiness in a challenging tropical environment.

In May 1841, British forces bombarded the walled city of Guangzhou after months of intermittent ceasefire negotiations. The Qing defenders had assembled some 10,000 soldiers on the surrounding heights, but the gap in artillery capability was so vast that the British commander, Major General Hugh Gough, felt confident enough to divide his forces.

The city paid a ransom of $6 million to prevent its complete destruction, A payment that contemporary Chinese accounts describe as the governor Yishan authorizing under direct duress of continued shelling. That figure too appears in British dispatches though reframed. It is described in a communique from Gough to the war office as a contribution to the costs of military operations necessitated by Chinese obstinacy.

On May 29th in the countryside surrounding Guangzhou, approximately 20,000 villagers and militiamen, shopkeepers, farmers, fishermen who had watched the foreign ships destroy their city attacked and defeated a British foraging party of Indian sepoys near the village of Sanyuanli. It was the only Chinese victory of the entire war.

Gough ordered a retreat. In every subsequent account written by British officers, the Sanyuanli engagement is described as a minor skirmish of no military significance. Every child’s history textbook in mainland China today contains an account of it. Every monument and shrine to its dead has been cataloged by provincial historians.

The British campaign’s northward march in 1841 and 1842, seizure of Xiamen, then Dinghai again, then Ningbo, then a sweep up the Yangtze operated on a military logic so efficient it barely registered the human texture of what it moved through. At Ningbo, a city of 250,000 people, British forces occupied the streets while the police fled.

With no law enforcement remaining, Chinese freebooters looted the city’s own residents extorting money from merchants who had survived the original occupation. When unaccompanied British soldiers walked through the streets, residents threw trash and human waste at them from upper windows. Sir Henry Pottinger, who arrived to take command in January 1842, wrote in a private letter that he felt considerable satisfaction in overseeing the confiscation of the city’s municipal treasury, over 160,000 pounds. He then imposed a 10% additional tax on the remaining population. Pottinger also submitted a formal report to London describing his administration of Ningbo as characterized by firmness combined with a scrupulous attention to the welfare of the civilian population. The burning of portions of the city by departing British forces that spring was not mentioned in the official report at all.

Zhenjiang, July 1842. A smell came first. British soldiers entering the western gate of Zhenjiang on the afternoon of July the 21st, 1842, reported it in their diaries before they reported anything else. Captain Richard Woosnam, serving with the 18th Royal Irish Regiment, wrote in his campaign journal, later deposited at the National Army Museum, that the interior streets of Zhenjiang smelled of fire and something else that we could not name until we saw what had been done.

What they found were the Manchu Bannerman, the hereditary military caste that had garrisoned the city. The garrison had consisted of 1,583 Bannerman, soldiers descended from the original Manchu conquerors of China two centuries earlier. To whom surrender carried a particular and permanent dishonor.

The British attacking force numbered over 6,000 men with artillery support, striking from three directions simultaneously. The ratio was approximately four attackers to every one defender. The Bannerman had fought room-to-room through the streets for hours before the city was taken. When British troops broke through the final positions, they found not prisoners awaiting capture, but evidence of what soldiers in multiple accounts described as mass deaths.

Families found in sealed buildings, wells filled, fires set. Many Bannerman had killed their wives and children before dying themselves rather than see them taken. The Chinese Repository, the English language journal published in Canton, reported the scene in its volume 11, 1842, as a spectacle of the most melancholy character, reflecting upon the severity of the engagement and the resolution of the Chinese character.

The battle’s formal tallies listed British casualties at 168 killed and wounded. Chinese military dead were listed at approximately 600, a figure drawn from the bodies counted in the immediate aftermath. What the British tallies did not include, because no one counted them and no official mechanism existed to count them, were the Bannerman’s families.

J. Elliot Bingham, a naval officer who published Narrative of the Expedition to China in 1843, based on his campaign journal, described entering houses where he found evidence that the defenders had performed a last service to those dependent upon them, preferring this to surrender. He described women and children.

He did not specify numbers. The Battle of Zhenjiang was the last major engagement of the First Opium War. Two weeks later, the Daoguang Emperor agreed to sue for peace, signing the Treaty of Nanking aboard HMS Cornwallis on August 29th, 1842. The treaty ceded Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity, opened five ports to foreign trade, abolished the Cohong trading system, and imposed an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars.

The word opium did not appear in the treaty’s text. In London, on April 8th, 1840, after the expedition had already sailed, but before most of its killing had occurred, a debate had taken place in the House of Commons over whether to authorize the war. The young member of Parliament, William Ewart Gladstone, rose and delivered a speech that his biographer, Michael Partridge, later described as one of the most morally unambiguous addresses in parliamentary history.

“A war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know and have not read of,” Gladstone told the chamber.

He was not finished. The war was, he insisted, being waged to protect an infamous contraband traffic. And whilst the Chinese had justice, we, the enlightened and civilized Christians, are pursuing objects at variance both with justice and with religion.

He declared himself in dread of the judgment of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China. The vote was taken the following morning. The government of Lord Palmerston prevailed by a margin of nine votes. The fleet was already approaching the coast of China. The Treaty of Nanking’s silence on opium was not an oversight.

Commissioner Lin Zexu, who had launched the chain of events that led to the war through his principled and catastrophic decision to destroy the British merchants’ stocks, had been dismissed by the Daoguang Emperor in October 1840 as a scapegoat for the war’s early reverses. He was exiled to Xinjiang province on the empire’s western frontier, where he spent 3 years building irrigation projects.

A subordinate who had fought alongside him later wrote that Lin continued to believe until the end of his days that the war could have been avoided, that he had been the instrument of a policy the emperor endorsed but would not defend. In his memoirs, Lin himself wrote that the emperor’s intervention came too late.

“If it had come 20 or 10 years earlier, the opium addiction could have been controlled.”

The East India Company’s Bengal opium revenues for 1843, the year after the Treaty of Nanking, showed an increase of 18% over the previous year. On October 8th, 1856, officers of the Guangzhou police boarded a Chinese cargo vessel called the Arrow in the Pearl River and arrested 12 of its crew members on charges of piracy and smuggling.

The ship flew a British flag. The British Consul at Guangzhou, Harry Parkes, demanded the immediate release of all 12 and a formal apology from the provincial authorities. Viceroy Ye Mingchen released the men within days, but declined to apologize, noting in official correspondence that the Arrow’s British registration had expired 3 weeks before the incident occurred, rendering its claim to British protection legally void.

The British Board of Trade had certified the ship’s registration on September 27th, 1855. The registration had lapsed on October 1st, 1856, 7 days before the arrest. Parkes knew this. He wrote it in a private dispatch to London, noting the difficulty of the legal position, but proceeded to demand the apology regardless.

Richard Cobden, a member of Parliament who had opposed the First Opium War and would oppose this one, obtained copies of the relevant documents and raised them in the Commons, stating flatly that there was no case and that the Consul knew it. Lord Palmerston’s government was toppled on the issue.

Then Palmerston went to the country, won a general election on the platform of punishing Chinese insolence, and the expedition sailed. Ye Mingchen, the Viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi, and the man at the center of the Arrow crisis, had governed Guangzhou for 3 years under conditions of persistent tension with the foreign communities.

He was, by the account of British diplomat Laurence Oliphant, who would travel with the 1860 expedition as secretary to Lord Elgin, a man of formidable administrative capacity and an absolute refusal to be moved by any representation, whether polite or threatening. Ye had faced an attempted British entry into Guangzhou in 1849, had organized the popular resistance that stopped it, and had continued to govern the city on the assumption that the British would eventually respect the limits of the 1842 treaty.

On December 28th, 1857, Anglo-French forces captured Guangzhou after an artillery bombardment. Ye was found hiding in the governor’s compound, arrested, and transported to Calcutta, India, where he died in captivity in early 1859, 11 months after his arrest. He refused throughout his captivity to issue any formal statement acknowledging the legitimacy of his capture.

British newspapers described him variously as pig-headed, the pig of Kwangtung, and the Viceroy of no surrender. The Times of London published a profile in 1858 that described him as having governed with the insolence characteristic of Asiatic officials confronted with the reasonable demands of modern commerce.

The pretext of the Arrow was not the only ingredient in the Second War’s chemistry. France joined the expedition, officially to avenge the execution of a French missionary, Père Auguste Chapdelaine, who had been beheaded in Guangxi province in February 1856 for illegally proselytizing in the Chinese interior.

The French government’s expressed rationale was morale. A Christian had been martyred, and the executioners had not been punished. Baron Jean-Baptiste Gros, the French ambassador who would lead the expedition’s diplomatic component, wrote in his published memoirs that France’s motive was to secure for France those same privileges in China that Great Britain has already obtained, and to protect the free exercise of the Catholic faith.

The British military commander, James Hope Grant, wrote in his private journal, published posthumously in 1901, that the French wanted territory and trade concessions at least as much as religious satisfaction, and everyone who saw their officers in the field knew it. The two powers whose expedition would end with the burning of the greatest cultural complex in Asia arrived on China’s coast in 1857, united by the stated purposes of defending commerce, sovereignty, and the cross.

The Anglo-French force that moved toward Beijing in the summer of 1860 numbered 17,700 men, 11,000 British and 6,700 French, supported by 173 ships. The Qing army opposing them was vastly larger in nominal terms, but the technology gap that had defined the first war had not narrowed. The Battle of Baliqiao, fought on September 21st, 1860, lasted approximately 90 minutes.

French and British cavalry, rifles, and artillery destroyed a Qing force that had assembled tens of thousands of soldiers, cavalry, and bannermen on a bridge approach north of Beijing. Estimates of Qing dead at Baliqiao ranged from 1,200 to 3,000. Allied casualties were five killed and 47 wounded. The French general, Charles Cousin Montauban, writing in his published memoirs, described the engagement as having proceeded with the precision of a military exercise.

A Chinese court memoir preserved in the Palace Museum archives describes the surviving soldiers falling back through burning villages in a route so complete that the road to the capital was open before nightfall, and those who had been sent to defend it were seen in Beijing the following morning still fleeing.

The Garden of Perfect Brightness, the Yuan Ming Yuan, was 5 mi northwest of Beijing. Spread across a landscape of artificial lakes and engineered rockeries, it covered more than 860 acres. It had been built and expanded by successive Qing emperors over 150 years. The Qianlong Emperor had employed Jesuit architects, among them the Italian Giuseppe Castiglione and the Frenchman Michel Benoist, to build a European Baroque wing complete with hydraulic fountains, mechanical automata, and clockwork mechanisms that had no equivalent elsewhere in China. The Imperial libraries within the complex held an estimated 1.5 million volumes. The warehouses contained accumulated treasure from a dynasty that had ruled one of the world’s largest economies for two centuries. Jade carvings, silk robes, bronze vessels, gold and silver objects, porcelain of a quality and antiquity that no Western museum possessed in 1860.

The army chaplain, Reverend R. J. L. McGee, serving with the British expedition and later the author of How We Got to Peking, 1862, described it at first approach as a vast labyrinth of picturesque rocks and noble timber, lakes and streams, summer houses roofed with porcelain of the Imperial yellow, theaters and their storehouses.

He was writing after its destruction. French troops arrived at the edges of the Yuanmingyuan on the night of October 5th, 1860. The complex was defended by a small number of palace eunuchs and a handful of soldiers. The Xianfeng Emperor and his court had already fled north to Jehol. On October 7th, General Cousin Montauban ordered his troops to enter.

What followed occupied several days and is documented in the memoirs of officers from both armies in terms that are remarkably consistent in their imagery. Robert Swinhoe, a British naturalist serving as interpreter with the expedition, wrote in his 1861 narrative of the North China Campaign:

“No one just then cared for gazing tranquilly at the works of art. Each one was bent on acquiring what was most valuable.”

Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General Garnet Wolseley, who would later become Field Marshal Lord Wolseley, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, wrote of witnessing his fellow soldiers in a condition where they seemed to have been seized with a temporary insanity. In body and soul, they were absorbed in one pursuit, which was plunder.

By October 9th, the most accessible portions of the palace had been stripped. Two formal commissioners, one from each army, were appointed to inventory the choicest items and divide them between the expeditionary forces. Lord Elgin personally selected a jade baton of command that had belonged to the emperor. The decision to burn the Yuanmingyuan was made by James Bruce, the 8th Earl of Elgin, the British High Commissioner, on October 17th, 1860. It was not impulsive. In a letter preserved in the British diplomatic archives, Elgin wrote that he came to the conclusion that the destruction of Yuanmingyuan was the least objectionable of the several courses open to me unless I could have reconciled it to my sense of duty to suffer the crime which had been committed to pass practically unavenged.

The crime he referenced was the imprisonment and torture of 39 members of an Anglo-French diplomatic delegation including British diplomat Harry Parkes and Thomas William Bowley, the Beijing correspondent of The Times, seized by the Qing general Sengge Rinchen in September under a flag of truce.

20 of the 39 had died in captivity. Some through torture that included, according to survivor testimony, confinement in cages so small that the prisoners could not straighten their limbs and the insertion of bamboo splinters under their fingernails. Thomas Bowley’s mutilated body had been returned to the British camp on October 6th, the day after French troops had entered the Yuan Ming Yuan for the first time.

On October 18th, 4,000 soldiers set fire to the buildings. The complex burned for 3 days and 3 nights. Victor Hugo, writing a year later from his exile in Guernsey, addressed an open letter to the expedition’s commanding officer in which he refused the logic of the burning’s justification:

“We call ourselves civilized, and them barbarians. Here is what civilization has done to barbarity.”

He cataloged the destruction. Libraries, porcelain, silk, paintings, theaters, treasures, all is gone. He then named what neither the British government’s dispatches nor Lord Elgin’s private letters directly named, that the men who burned the palace the morning after their torture justification arrived, had already been looting it for 11 days before the prisoners’ fate was known.

Charles George Gordon, a young British officer who would achieve imperial fame as Chinese Gordon and die at Khartoum in 1885 wrote in a letter home from Beijing in October 1860 that he could scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places being burnt. He added:

“I am very sorry we did this, but it served the people right for the treatment they meted out to our ambassadors.”

He wrote both sentences in the same letter with no apparent awareness of their tension. The Chinese government estimates that approximately 1.5 million items looted from Yuanmingyuan are now located in 47 museums across the world. UNESCO’s 2006 survey placed the number at 1.6 million. The French ambassador, Baron Gros, who had stood alongside Elgin in the diplomatic negotiations and whose troops had been first through the Yuanmingyuan’s gates in October, declined to participate in the burning.

He called it, in his dispatches to Paris, “unnecessary and dangerous revenge.” The French soldiers had by this point already removed to their own stores the objects identified by the French commissioner as most valuable. Gros’ objection was not that the palace had been stripped, but that setting it alight after stripping it constituted an act of disproportionate symbolism.

In his memoir, Cousin Montauban described deploring the looting of China’s imperial archives, which held part of the country’s history, while acknowledging that he had done nothing to prevent it. When the Convention of Peking was signed on October 24th, 1860, bringing the Second Opium War to its formal conclusion, it legalized the opium trade, opened Tianjin and additional ports, permitted Christian missionaries to own land anywhere in China, and imposed a further indemnity of 8 million taels on the Qing.

The smoke from the Garden of Perfect Brightness was still visible over Beijing that morning. The ruin was not visible in a single image. It accumulated across decades and territories. The Treaty of Nanking in 1842 and the Convention of Peking in 1860 together constructed what Chinese historians would call the unequal treaty system, a legal architecture that exempted British and French nationals from Chinese law, forced import tariffs below 5%, opened coastal cities to foreign residents and trade, and guaranteed the opium traffic a protected status under international commercial law.

What the treaties did not guarantee, what no treaty mentioned, was the continuation of the 10 million taels in silver that had been flowing out of China annually through the 1830s to pay for the drug. By 1880, that figure had grown substantially. Emperor Daoguang had written to the British negotiators at Nanking in a message conveyed through intermediaries and preserved in the Chinese Imperial Archives:

“I cannot prevent the introduction of the flowing poison. Gain-seeking and corrupt men will, for profit and sensuality, defeat my wishes. But nothing will induce me to derive a revenue from the vice and misery of my people.”

The Convention of Peking, signed by his successor’s brother, Prince Gong, on his behalf, derived precisely that. The addiction that had terrified Lin Zexu in 1839, the 10,000 cases he identified in Guangzhou province alone, expanded through the second half of the 19th century at a rate that no document from the period fully captures because no institution was charged with capturing it.

What the provincial records do show is that when Lin successors attempted to restrict the trade, the unequal treaty framework gave British merchants legal recourse that the Chinese government could not override. Opium smoking moved from the coastal cities into the interior, from the merchant classes to the agricultural laboring poor, from the adults to the young.

The Asian Pacific curriculum has documented that withdrawal from opium dependency in 19th century China frequently produced cramps, nausea, and cardiovascular collapse severe enough to kill. And that addicted individuals would often do almost anything to continue to get access to the drug. Britain did not restrict its own opium trade to China until 1906, 67 years after Lin Zexu had destroyed the Canton stockpiles to force that restriction.

China turned, in the interim, to growing its own supply, becoming the world’s largest opium producer by the end of the century, in order to service a demand that foreign merchants had created and foreign armies had protected. The Bannerman who survived Zhenjiang did not appear in subsequent British military records because there was nothing in the record-keeping conventions of the Royal Expeditionary Forces that required accounting for the status of the defended population after a city was taken.

The bereaved families of eunuchs who had burned alive in the Yuanmingyuan were not tallied by any commission. The women of Zhenjiang, described obliquely in J. Elliott Bingham’s 1843 narrative and nowhere else in the official archive, left no petitions, no correspondence, no memorials to themselves. What the archive does contain, in remarkable abundance, is the accounting of what was taken.

British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, who had authorized the first war and who received the news of Hong Kong’s session with contempt, calling it a barren rock with nary a house upon it, lived to see his assessment proved incorrect. The island was developed into one of the busiest trading ports in Asia.

Britain held it for 156 years. The Empress of China’s Pekingese lapdog, seized from the Yuanmingyuan during the looting, was presented to Queen Victoria and named with what appears to have been sincere affection, Looty. She lived in Buckingham Palace until 1872. The stamp on a gilt metal box sold at auction by the British auctioneers Woolley and Wallis in 2010 read, in unambiguous English, “Loot from the Summer Palace, Peking, October 1860.”