How Can We Go So Far as to Change the Regulations of the Celestial Empire – Which are Over a Hundred Years Old – at the Request of One Man – of You, O King!?
—Edict of the Qianlong Emperor to King George III of England, August 1793
We were not the first band of foreigners to be kept waiting and given the runaround in China, nor the first to be sent with impossible instructions. For years visitors have felt confused, rebuffed and bamboozled by what they’ve found there; and none of them more so than the British.
In the autumn of 1792, while the world was preoccupied by the French Revolution, three ships set sail quietly from the south coast of England. King Louis XVI of France had been deposed and there’d been massacres in the prisons. Guillotine blades skidded down greased runners as carts piled high with severed heads rumbled through the shadows around the walls of the old Bastille; Europe braced for war. So the dispatch by George III of an embassy to China attracted little attention as it cast off with the morning tide on 26 September. The expedition was led by a former ambassador to the Russian tsarina, the Right Honourable Lord Macartney, and consisted of physicians, astronomers, painters, musicians, clockmakers, soldiers and servants, numbering more than seven hundred in all. The purpose of the mission was explained in a letter carried by the ambassador from His Britannic Majesty to the Celestial Emperor as follows:
We have taken opportunities of fitting out Ships and sending in them some of the most wise and learned of Our Own People, for the discovery of distant regions … Our ardent wish [is] to become acquainted with the celebrated institutions of Your Majesty’s populous and extensive Empire … [T]hese considerations have determined Us to depute an Ambassador to Your Court [for] communication with … your Sublime Person … [W]e rely on Your Imperial Majesty’s wisdom that You will allow Our Subjects frequenting the coasts of Your dominions fair access to Your markets.
Imperator Augustissime
Vester bonus frater et Amicus
Georgius R
This was not the first embassy to tackle China; Portugal, the Netherlands and Russia had all sent ambassadors on more than one occasion, but they had each returned empty-handed. The gates to the Celestial Empire, it seemed, remained hermetically sealed. France had sent missionaries, and a handful of Jesuit priests had lived in Beijing for a number of years, but none had ever returned. In fact, Macartney’s was the sixteenth embassy sent to pry open the gates, but it was the first worthy of the name. Supremely confident, possessed of the world’s most powerful navy, and poised on the threshold of the Industrial Revolution, the British were fixed upon impressing the ancient Middle Kingdom with gifts that displayed the most ingenious inventions of the modern European age; but more important – as George III stated in his letter – they were determined to open the channels of trade.
Macartney’s first problem was finding translators; there weren’t any. He eventually recruited two Chinese priests who had been living at the Collegium Sinicum in Naples. Although they knew no English, they could communicate with passable Latin. Father Li’s teeth had been ruined by smoking and Father Zhou had that somewhat familiar passion for crunching dried melon pips, which Macartney described as ‘a habit not easily tolerated by a gentleman.’ Impressed by Li’s single-minded commitment to smoking, Macartney was later less surprised than he might have been to find out that everyone smoked in China – even the children, who came running out of houses with pipes between their teeth. In fact, smoking was so prevalent that if someone was deathly ill and on his last legs, the Chinese would say, ‘He’s so ill he can’t even smoke any more.’
After leaving the English Channel, the embassy was blown off course in the Atlantic and the ships became separated. They only regrouped the following March at Batavia – now Jakarta – in what was then known as the Dutch East Indies. Eleven days later, they set sail northwards. After more than nine months at sea, the embassy finally caught sight of the Chinese mainland and dropped anchor at Macao. Terrified of being caught assisting the embassy, one of the translators skipped ship and disappeared – Macartney had heard that Chinese were forbidden to leave China and that the punishment for teaching Mandarin to a foreigner was death. The other, a Tatar whose Chinese was less fluent, took the more imaginative option of disguising himself as a foreigner.
The embassy, meanwhile, was under strict surveillance by the watchful mandarins onshore. Prior to his arrival, Macartney had requested permission to visit Beijing from the customs house in Canton, not through the provincial governor as required by the Celestial Regulations. The governor, unsettled by this ignorance of court etiquette, had sent an anxious memorial to the emperor seeking further instructions:
Upon their arrival in Canton, the English barbarians asked to be taken to the Customs Office to present a request. We immediately granted them an audience. Their report states that the King of England … has dispatched an envoy. The Rites require that barbarians, once granted permission to enter a port, present a copy of their sovereign’s request, along with a list of the articles of tribute. The king of England, however, has supplied us with neither of these two documents. We have only the letter submitted by the English merchants. Your humble slave dare not present such a document to Your Majesty.
The memorial was returned with annotations in vermillion brushstrokes from the emperor’s own hand: ‘We will transmit instructions to you.’ The countless cogs of the state’s vast bureaucratic machinery had glided silently into motion. From that moment, every step of the embassy was monitored and logged, every act recorded and transmitted to the emperor by special runners who worked in relays that could cover as much as six hundred li in a day. Edicts from Beijing were dispatched back to the provinces, copied, given a response and returned. The emperor added his final marginal notes in red ink before the runners headed back posthaste to the provinces. The system had operated for centuries and had been overhauled by Qianlong’s father, the Yongzheng Emperor. In Qianlong’s reign, hundreds of documents could be on the road at any one time, connecting the centre through a web of highly trained mandarin officials across vast distances to the daily affairs of every far-flung corner of the empire.
The embassy cast off from Macau to the sound of church bells calling the faithful to Mass. It proceeded up the coast and stopped at the Zhoushan Islands, off the coast of Zhejiang, just south of modern-day Shanghai. It was here that the embassy had its first inkling that protocol was to become a major obstacle to its success.
The mandarin official sent to accompany the embassy to Beijing refused to step on board the ship. Imperial regulations required imperial officials to ‘descend onto the barbarian vessel,’ but the ship was too large for the Chinese to construct the customary bamboo walkway downward from the quay towards the boat. It was simply inconceivable that the mandarin would contemplate clambering upward onto the decks, so he refused to go on board at all. Instead he sent provisions including some twenty steers, more than a hundred sheep and hogs, a hundred ducks, and 160 sacks of flour as the first, emphatic demonstration of the excesses of Chinese hospitality.
Confusion over the gifts brought for the emperor from England was the next difficulty; etiquette required Macartney to understate their value but he couldn’t bring himself to describe them as ‘mere trinkets from our poor country’, as the mandarin had suggested. Next he discovered that the Chinese version of the list of gifts was riddled with translation errors.
