DgcityFour bronze animal heads that once spouted water in an imperial fountain have gone on show together in the Yangtze River delta town of Kunshan. The ox, tiger, monkey and boar heads, looted from Beijing’s Old Summer Palace in 1860, anchor a new exhibition of cultural relics that made their way back to China from overseas.
The display, titled around the theme of national treasures returning to their source, opened at the Kunshan Museum of Opera ahead of the museum’s third anniversary. The four heads share the galleries with Shang and Zhou bronzes and Northern Dynasties stone carvings, arranged to trace a single cultural thread across millennia. The animal heads themselves were cast in reddish copper for a water clock in the gardens’ Haiyantang hall, where twelve zodiac figures took turns spraying water to mark the hours.
They spent most of the past 160 years scattered abroad. The ox, tiger and monkey heads were bought back at Hong Kong auctions in 2000, and the boar followed in 2003, recovered with the help of the casino magnate Stanley Ho. Of the twelve original zodiac heads, seven have now returned to the Chinese mainland; several others remain missing.
Close up, the heads blend European clockwork fountain design with Chinese animal imagery and unusually fine casting. The ox glares straight ahead, the tiger’s mane bristles, the monkey is alert and narrow-eyed, and the boar shows long tusks and a blunt snout. Kunshan, the birthplace of kunqu opera, frames the show as an act of guardianship of the same kind it gives its six-century-old stage tradition. The exhibition opened on October 30 and runs through the autumn.
The fountain was the centrepiece of the Western Mansions, a cluster of baroque palaces and waterworks laid out in the 1740s and 1750s for the Qianlong emperor with the help of Jesuit missionaries, among them Giuseppe Castiglione. Anglo-French troops looted and burned the gardens in 1860 during the Second Opium War, and the heads vanished into private collections abroad. Two more, the rat and rabbit, returned from France in 2013, and the horse followed in 2020, bringing the total to seven and leaving five still unaccounted for.
