It is an event in history that China excises from textbooks. Yet the playwright Zhang Guangtian has dared to expose it in clear view on a Beijing stage and, somehow, he has evaded the censor.

Mr Zhang’s exposé is of the role that the Chinese played in the ruin of much of their own culture over the past 150 years, and not only the foreigners most often blamed.

It is a topic so sensitive that a prominent Chinese magazine that published an article running counter to the official version of history early this year was temporarily closed and its editors removed.

But in Yuan Ming Yuan, Mr Zhang, one of China’s most avant-garde playwrights, departs from the Communist Party view of assigning blame for history and has decided to seek answers.

He hopes his play will inspire audiences to question why Chinese culture has lost its way, why the environment is so degraded and why the pursuit of material benefit has overwhelmed society.

The title is carefully chosen. Yuan Ming Yuan is the sprawling imperial palace and garden of China’s last Qing dynasty emperors in the northeastern outskirts of Beijing that was burnt by British and French troops in 1860.

This was no haphazard act by invading barbarians as Chinese history books recount. Lord Elgin, commander of the troops, viewed the act as fitting retribution after Qing imperial officers captured a group of British and French envoys, tortured them and killed 12 — including The Times correspondent Thomas Bowlby.

His play shows Chinese leading the invaders into the palace to burn and loot its greatest treasures. And how, over the next century and a half, Chinese plundered and destroyed the rest of the Garden of Eternal Brightness. The pleasure garden of the Qing emperors becomes a metaphor for China and the ravages wrought by years of greed, neglect, corruption and economic reform.

Mr Zhang sees the country facing a choice of whether to embrace sustainable development or breakneck growth, of whether to seek happiness or wealth.

China faces a critical moment in its history in his view. He told The Times: “Now we praise the achievements of development. But who’s taking responsibility? We are not a people capable of self-criticism. We are too proud and we don’t like to lose face.”

The play, produced with the support of the State Environmental Protection Agency, deluges the audience with leaflets and numbers — how many million Chinese have no clean water, how many live in cancer villages, how many breathe polluted air.

One character in the play says: “One moment it’s all about class struggle, one moment it’s all about GDP. China is like a pancake: when one side is burnt we flip it over but when will we actually make people what it’s all about?”

One of Mr Zhang’s previous plays, The Sage Confucius, was ordered off the stage by the authorities. His latest play is due to run until August 5. That is as long as its spotlight on the inequities born of reform and on a view of history that the party prefers to ignore do not test the limits of official tolerance.

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