The elephant is an outlier: generally at Waddesdon, anything that looks gold is just that. Waddesdon Manor, an extraordinary Loire chateau built on the side of a Buckinghamshire hill and completed by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in 1883, is one of the National Trust’s most spectacular treasure houses, holding masterpieces of painting, furniture, silver, porcelain and textiles, many originally made for the royal families of Europe.

A tangle of snakes writhe among revolving stars, topped with a golden howdah hung with shivering crystal drops, occupied by a sultan turning slowly to study his kingdom-all to the incongruous accompaniment of tinkling tunes from the music box, which is concealed in the rocky shore on which the elephant stands. There are crocodiles, gryphons, mermaids, beetles and a diamond-studded lily that furls and unfurls its petals. He has assembled tiny oriental figures traversing fingernail-sized bridges. He has just dismantled its thousands of moving parts for the third time, and, more importantly, put them all back together again.

When horologist Jonathan Betts first encountered the Waddesdon elephant, the wonderful Georgian toy had not rolled its eyes, flapped its ears or swung its great golden trunk for half a century.

Golden palace youtube