Reminder that the British aristocracy's wealth came from looting and exploiting their former colonies while doing things like pushing the Opium trade in China for example. They are just thieves, proudly parading their stolen loot. These people have no shame. The fact that these thieving, racist, xenophobic, classist aristocrats still have fans is something that amazes me daily.
Rose Hanbury, Marchioness of Cholmondeley, Accused of Possessing Looted Chinese Artifacts
After images were recently widely circulated anew from older stories in the Financial Times, Vanity Fair, and other media about Hanbury and Houghton Hall—the 18th-century estate in the Norfolk countryside where she lives with her husband David Rocksavage, the Marquess of Cholmondeley, and their three children—some social media users have taken particular note of specific pieces of oriental decor, suggesting that they may have been pillaged from China during the late Qing Dynasty, toward the end of the 19th century. “The luxurious life of Prince William’s ‘mistress’ Rose actually came from China,” reads the title of a post last week on Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like Chinese social media platform. According to the post—and similar ones spread across other Chinese social media platforms like Weibo and Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) and eventually also on the likes of TikTok, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter)—Hanbury’s husband had inherited the furniture in question from the Sassoons (of which he is a descendant through his paternal grandmother, Sybil Sassoon). In fact, the Sassoons, nicknamed “the Rothschilds of the East,” were a Jewish Baghdadi family that owned and oversaw a 19th-century trading empire, which grew much of its immense fortune dealing in commodities like textiles, tea, and notably opium across India, China, and beyond. As future generations of Sassoons gravitated toward England, they officially entered the British aristocracy when the family patriarch’s son Abdallah was knighted in 1872 as Sir Albert. Since then, the Sassoons gained prominence as wealthy business owners, politicians, and friends of the royal family. While the Sassoons played a significant role in shaping China and were avid collectors of art from around the world, it’s unclear whether they acquired specific items through purchase or pilfering. The height of their business in the country, however, coincided with China’s “century of humiliation,” which started in 1839 and ended in 1945 and was marked by the looting of millions of artifacts—most notably from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, which was ransacked by British and French soldiers during the second Opium War.
