court language, it had been converted into gibberish. Macartney had brought a planetarium to demonstrate Europe’s achievements in combining an understanding of the motion of celestial bodies – including the four moons of Jupiter – with the latest in precision engineering. But the Chinese had no idea what it was. Planetarium had been translated phonetically and rendered meaningless. After much discussion it was listed as a ‘geographical and astronomical musical clock’. In the end, the Chinese never read the list or even wondered what the articles might be; all that mattered was that the number of individual items was correct and that the list was complete.
These translation difficulties propelled an unlikely character to the fore. Macartney’s deputy had brought along his son, a boy named Thomas Staunton, who had picked up some Chinese language from the two priests on the long voyage. The youth, whose ‘senses were more acute and organs more flexible, proved to be a tolerably good interpreter’, so he took over much of the translation.
Once the gifts had been properly categorized, the ships moved farther up the coast towards Tianjin, where they were to be packed into crates, loaded onto junks, and transported to the docks at Dagu. There they would be transferred onto smaller junks and taken inland by canal before finally going ashore for the twelve-mile journey to Beijing. A memorial to the emperor read:
In all, there are 590 pieces to be transferred from the barbarian ships to the port. The handling operation is proceeding without interruption but is not yet complete. The passengers of the ships will enter the port only after the tribute has been fully unloaded.
‘This is excellent and we fully approve,’ wrote the vermillion brush.
It was at Dagu that the embassy first encountered Chinese delaying tactics. They had been travelling for almost a year and were impatient to see the emperor. But now they were told that a viceroy had suddenly arrived to greet them. Ushered into a large hall in a temple, surrounded by tents with streamers and guarded by horsemen with bows and arrows, they were entertained with elaborate tea ceremonies, enquiries about their health, and explanations of ‘the emperor’s satisfaction with their arrival’. Macartney fumed quietly and fidgeted throughout the banquet until the viceroy suddenly announced that the embassy would only be granted an audience in Jehol, the emperor’s summer retreat, rather than in Beijing as previously planned. This sudden change in destination presented a major complication; many of the delicate instruments would be damaged on such a long overland journey to Jehol. But before Macartney could respond, the viceroy announced that he would be leaving the next day and planned to return only after six weeks.
Around this time, the central problem of the embassy became clear. For a foreigner to meet the emperor, or even receive an edict from him, he had to perform the ke-tou, or kow-tow. This ‘head-bumping ceremony’ consisted of first standing upright, then grovelling on the floor, banging one’s head against the ground three times, standing up, then going back down on all fours, banging the forehead again, and repeating the whole procedure three times so that nine head bumps were performed in all. It never occurred to the Chinese that Macartney might object. As far as they were concerned, the kow-tow was simply a formality by which a barbarian submitted to the perfection of the Celestial Empire in order to prepare himself for the benefits of civilization. Anyway, there was no precedent for doing anything else. But Macartney was having none of it; as representative of George III, he only agreed to go down on one knee. He only went down on two knees for the Almighty, so grovelling on all fours in front of some Oriental despot was entirely out of the question. So the two sides entered a phase of protracted negotiations. The Chinese addressed the matter obliquely – first by suggesting that the Englishmen might like to change their clothes, since the kow-tow would be easier to perform without garters and knee buckles. Macartney made a counterproposal: he would produce a portrait of George III and whatever ceremony he performed in front of the emperor, a mandarin of equivalent rank would perform in front of the portrait of the English king.
Meanwhile, Macartney had been informed that the characters on the banners on boats escorting the embassy had been quietly changed from
On 21 August 1793, a little short of a year after leaving Portsmouth, the embassy passed by the great corner watchtowers of the Imperial City. Guards of honour fired salvos from the ramparts while three thousand porters passed through the enormous double gateways carrying nearly six hundred packages, some so large they needed thirty-six men to carry them. They were followed by eighty-five wagons and thirty-nine handcarts filled with wine, beer, and other European produce. Eight pieces of artillery brought up the rear. Inside, the visitors were confronted by a human anthill. Brides went to their future husbands with squalling music and gongs; mourners dressed in white wailed over the departed. Wheelbarrows groaned under stacks of watermelons next to pots of live eels while, under the swooping eaves of the great gateways to the Imperial City, long lines of dromedaries brought coal from Tartary.
The embassy settled into the quarters near the Old Summer Palace, the Garden of Perfect Brightness, and awaited instructions to proceed to Jehol for the audience with the emperor. The accommodation was adequate, although one member of the expedition couldn’t help noticing the smell of ‘putrefying garlic and over-used blankets’.
By this time, Macartney had begun to realize that China had the most ritualized society on earth. Ceremonial rites formed one of the key foundations of Confucianism, and Confucianism underpinned the Chinese sense of identity. The Celestial bureaucracy consisted of six tribunals, equivalent to ministries, and the Tribunal of Rites enforced strict observation of court ritual. It also supervised the imperial examination system, which had first been conceived by the Han as a way of selecting and promoting civil servants. Introduced properly by the Sui in the sixth century, the exam system had been perfected four hundred years later under the Song and it had been in use for centuries by the time it was abolished by the Qing in 1905. The tribunal also controlled the movements of envoys and receipt of tribute.
Macartney, however, knew little of this as he haggled about the kow-tow. After several rounds of unsuccessful negotiations, he noticed that the old mandarin who had refused to board the ship at Zhoushan had vanished. Apparently he’d been replaced by another official. Macartney was delighted with the change, as he had heard that the new official was a cousin of the emperor and so assumed that he had more power at court. But there were hundreds of ‘cousins’; all it meant was that he was related to one of the emperor’s numerous concubines. In fact, the old mandarin had been a salt tax commissioner and his replacement had at one time been in charge of the Ming Tombs. Both were quite junior and hopelessly out of their depth. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the vermillion brushstrokes moved across the pages – silently, alone, in secret – directing every move.
Finally, the embassy was allowed to travel to Jehol, where the emperor spent the summer, some hundred miles northeast of Beijing. They travelled through hills and patches of dense farmland, finally passing under the Great Wall and out into a fallow, wilder landscape. In places, the road was so steep that extra horses were needed to pull up the carts. The smooth imperial roadway was off-limits to the British; for eight days the horses limped and stumbled along the rocky pathways.
During an overnight stop, one of the mandarin officials asked to see the ‘admirable rarities brought for the Emperor’, explaining that he’d heard they were carrying fowl that ate coal, an elephant the size of a cat, and a ‘magic pillow’. All this, said the mandarin, was ‘surely true’ because ‘he had read about it in the newspapers’. Macartney
