Looty Goes to Heaven
Back at the gate to heaven, Looty watched a hedgehog waddle its way through the hole in the thicket. Before she could go in, she had to give the green-faced person a true account of her life. The green-faced person said, in their gravelly voice, “It can be as short or as long as you like. The only condition is that it must be absolutely true.”
A small Pekingese dog was taken from China at the end of the Second Opium War by British troops, brought to England, and gifted to Queen Victoria. This dog was renamed Looty, in reference to how she was found during the looting of the Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) outside of Beijing. Looty lived for twelve years at the British royal palaces and died in 1872. It is not known where she was buried.
The Opium Wars were driven, in part, by the British demand for tea from China. In the 1800s, the tea-drinking market, including newly industrialized labour, grew so big that British merchants cultivated a new, exploitative opium industry to counter this so-called trade deficit. Opium was grown by indentured labourers on plantations in South Asia, then imported on a massive scale into China. Silver received from the sale of opium was used to purchase tea. The objections of the Chinese state to this influx of cheap opium led to the Opium Wars.
Looty was one of the first Pekingese dogs in England, and her arrival informed new trends in chinoiserie, dog breeding, and eugenics. For close to fifty years, Pekingese dogs were the most popular breed of toy dog in England.
Looty Goes to Heaven takes the form of an animation, a speculative fiction, and a poppy meadow. The looping animation, made in collaboration with artist Emerson Maxwell, shows Looty in a state of eternal rest. The speculative fiction book, available in English and Traditional Chinese, imagines Looty’s life and afterlife. This project revived Looty’s story in the context of Birmingham, UK, which is the current site of Crufts, the largest dog show in the world, as well as the home of Ty-phoo tea, a brand named after the Chinese word for doctor.
Looty’s Meadow (2024-ongoing), planted in Digbeth, Birmingham, a few blocks away from the site of the Ty-phoo tea factory, features varieties of papaver somniferum (opium poppy) and papaver orientale alongside a wildflower meadow.
