This is one of a group of Chinese cushion covers and textile fragments that belonged to Viscount Garnet Wolseley (1833-1913). During the Second Opium War, he served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the combined British and French forces. In October 1860 this army plundered and destroyed the Summer Palace of Yuanming Yuan on the outskirts of Beijing. This vast complex of buildings and parklands had served as a retreat for the successive Qing dynasty emperors since the early 18th century. In the book he published on his return to Britain, Narrative of the War with China in 1860, Wolseley described how troops had found ‘a mine of wealth and of everything curious in the Empire…rooms filled with articles of vertu and jars of immense value, and houses stored with silks, satins and embroidery’. It was the textiles that seem to have particularly appealed to Wolseley as he comments on the ‘cushions… covered in the finest yellow satin embroidered over with figures of dragons and flowers… Yellow is the imperial colour and none but those of royal birth are permitted to wear it’. It was just such objects that Wolseley chose to take back home. The kudos that these looted imperial objects acquired is testified to by the fact that someone has embroidered on the back of a number of the cushion covers ‘From the Summer Palace, Pekin’. Viscountess Wolseley gifted the textiles to the museum after her husband’s death.