At the time, the palace was occupied by only some eunuchs and palace maids; the Xianfeng Emperor and his entourage had already fled to the Chengde Mountain Resort in Hebei. Although the French commander Charles Cousin-Montauban assured his British counterpart, James Hope Grant, that "nothing had been touched", extensive looting of the palace had already been carried out by Allied soldiers. There was no significant resistance to the looting, even though many Qing soldiers were in the vicinity. On October 18, Lord Elgin, the British High Commissioner to China, retaliated against the torture of the delegation members by ordering the destruction of the Old Summer Palace. Destroying the Old Summer Palace was also a warning to the Qing Empire not to use kidnapping as a political tactic against Britain. It took 3,500 British troops to set the entire place ablaze, and the massive fire lasted for three days. Unbeknownst to the troops, some 300 remaining eunuchs and palace maids, who concealed themselves from the soldiers in locked rooms, perished when the palace complex was burnt. Only 13 buildings survived intact, most of them in the remote areas or by the lakeside. (The palace would be sacked once again and completely destroyed in 1900 when the forces of the Eight-Nation Alliance invaded Beijing.) Charles George Gordon, who was then a 27-year-old captain in the Royal Engineers and part of the 1860 Anglo-French expeditionary force, wrote about his experience: British and French soldiers preferred porcelain while neglecting bronze vessels prized locally for cooking and burial in tombs. Many such treasures dated back to the Shang, Zhou and Han dynasties and were up to 3,600 years old. A specific exception was the looting of the Haiyantang Zodiac fountain with its twelve bronze animal heads. Some of the most notable treasures ended up at the Chinese Museum in the Palace of Fontainebleau, which Empress Eugénie specifically set up in 1867 to house these newly acquired collections. Once the Old Summer Palace had been reduced a sign was raised by the Allied expeditionary force with an inscription in Chinese stating, "This is the reward for perfidy and cruelty". The burning of the palace was the last act of the war. According to Professor Wang Daocheng of the Renmin University of China, not all of the palace was destroyed in the original burning. Instead, some historical records indicate that 16 of the garden scenes survived the