Pages

18 May 2014

The First British Embassy to China, 1793-1794

Earlier this week I gave a talk on the
first British Embassy to China. My talk looked at how historians in the West have viewed the embassy, as well as a short survey of some of the imagery which was created during and after the mission, including a brief look at an exhibition I worked on in Beijing in 2007, which featured some of the original gifts that were given as part of the embassy in 1793. Adapted from my talk, this present blog post will take a look at the embassy, the exhibition, and the theme of 'cross-cultural' exchange. And then my next post will examine the work of William Alexander, an artist who accompanied the embassy, as well as some of the artistic responses to the mission once it had returned to Britain.

Part I - The Embassy

As with the first British mission to Japan 182 years before, the embassy sent to China in 1793, which was led by Lord George Macartney, set out in
three ships – the Lion, the Hindostan, and the Jackall(which became lost in heavy weather in the Bay of Biscay, but happilymanaged to rejoin the group again in the Sunda Straits, near Batavia). The purpose of the mission was to try to open China up
to the burgeoning new system of global ‘free-trade’ which was then being forged
by the nations of the West. Several European nations had already established
trading hongs (warehouses) at the southern Chinese
port of Canton (Guangzhou), the only place in China at that time where foreign
sea trade was permitted (there was also an inland trading post, officially
sanctioned by the Chinese court, at Kiakhta, where Russians came overland to
buy and sell goods). But the British in particular were not content with this
single point of exchange, they very much wanted to expand their access and
trade network to other parts of the vast Qing Empire. The Qing, on the other
hand, were very wary of this and they consistently refused such overtures.
Other western nations had already sent diplomatic missions to China, notably
the Dutch, the Portuguese, and, of course, the Russians, as already mentioned.
‘The Macartney Embassy’, as it's now more commonly remembered, was the
first trade mission which sought to break the mould of those which had gone
before; and, as such, it has become a notorious episode, often cited, in the
history of East-West relations.

Traditional historiography has
consistently framed the encounter as a spectacular failure on the British part,
best summed up as the result of a clash of cultures, in which the British and
the Qing simply failed to understand each other. My talk and the seminar which
followed looked at this traditional view and examined how more recent
historiography has since sought to balance this perception by looking at
various Chinese archival sources relating to the famous encounter. In the past,
and even quite recently (cf. Peyrefitte), historians have taken contemporary Western reports of
the mission very much at face value. The idea being that rational,
‘progressive’ Westerners were seeking to engage with irrational, ‘backward’
Easterners by impressing them with their advanced scientific knowledge and new
technologies. But as the Emperor Qianlong famously stated in his letter to King George III, replying to this overture for closer international relations: “As your Ambassador can see for himself, we
possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no
use for your country’s manufactures.”

The rebuff was not taken lightly,
and Macartney’s certainly was not the last British trade mission to China
either – another was led by Lord Amherst in 1816 but was refused an audience
with the Emperor entirely. As many historians have stated the major point of contention between the two sides
was a question of differing cultural perceptions. The British believed in a new
world order of sovereign nation-states whose authority was derived from a
secular-based system of laws; and so, with the precedent already established in
Europe, the British duly presumed to expect that they should deal with other
great nations on an equal diplomatic footing – indeed, in their eyes, this was very
much the mark of civilised societies.
The Chinese world order, however, maintained that China was the centre of
civilisation and the Emperor was the ‘Son of Heaven’, therefore all the peoples
of the world owed varying degrees of fealty to the Emperor. The Emperor, of
course, was a just and benevolent ruler, and as for those distant, outer
barbarians (such as the Europeans) who were not fortunate enough to come under
the Emperor’s direct rule, it had been decreed that they were permitted to
acknowledge the Emperor’s universal supremacy by periodically offering tribute. As such, Qianlong viewed
Macartney’s trade embassy as a mission to deliver tribute. There were certain
protocols and ceremonial rituals which needed to be adhered to, naturally – and as
the British mission progressed, travelling through China to meet with the
Emperor himself, the Qing knowledge network sent back reports to the Manchu Court
which seemed to present certain frustrations. It appeared that the British were
entirely ignorant of these rituals and so they would need to be guided onto the
right path.

However, from the British point of
view it was these ‘archaic rituals’ and protocols which became the major
sticking point. There was one ritual in particular which did not align with
their ideals nor their intentions. It became a stubborn point of pride – it was
of course the ritual of the kowtow,
in which the British envoys were expected to ceremonially prostrate themselves
before the Emperor. This, of course, was seen as an acknowledgement of
inferiority, and consequently it was something which the British
plenipotentiaries simply could not countenance. The Qing were quite rightly
baffled – the Dutch, the Portuguese, and the Russians before them did not
seem to have had any problems with performing this ritual gesture. Interestingly
enough and perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, after much discussion it seems the
Qing did eventually give way – as according to some accounts Lord Macartney
simply went down on one knee when he met the Emperor (other accounts state that
when finally admitted into the august Son of Heaven’s presence Lord Macartney
was naturally overwhelmed by the great Emperor’s majesty and so he instinctively
performed the kowtow without any hesitation).

The attitudes on each side are
worth considering in more detail. Macartney was no inexperienced envoy, he had
served overseas in various British domains and he had been a successful
ambassador to the Court of Catherine the Great in Russia. Similarly he had
certainly done his homework on the voyage out, reading as much as he could of
contemporary accounts of China from a well-stocked library on-board his ship
put together for this express purpose. His journals initially seem quite
sympathetic towards the Chinese, yet he appears to have made no effort to learn
the Chinese language; as he rather condescendingly states: “We are quite ignorant of their language (which, I suppose, cannot be a
very difficult one, for little George Staunton has long since learned to speak
it and write it with great readiness, and from that circumstance has been of
infinite use to us on many occasions).”

‘Little’ George Thomas Staunton was the 12
year old son of the embassy’s principal Secretary, and the young boy’s command
of the Chinese language (which he’d learnt from native-born teachers on the
voyage out) certainly seems to have impressed the Emperor Qianlong, who it is
reported broke with protocol again by directly bestowing a gift upon the boy
from his own hand. Indeed, Qianlong himself was by 1793 already a long-lived
and therefore highly astute ruler. He observed of the British that: “Among the Western ocean states, England
ranks foremost in strength. It is said that the English have robbed and
exploited the merchant ships of the other Western ocean states so that the
foreigners along the Western ocean are terrified of their brutality.”

It’s intriguing to note that of all
commentators, perhaps one of the most unlikely was Napoleon Bonaparte, who thought
that Lord Macartney ought to have complied with the local customs as he believed each
sovereignty had the right to dictate how it was to be diplomatically approached
on its own soil. It was later claimed that the Qing’s arrogant insistence
regarding its own sense of superiority over all other peoples was a rod which
it made for its own back, and that this was the root cause of several subsequent,
devastating conflicts with the West, not least the Opium Wars and the ‘gunboat
diplomacy’ of the 19th Century. Yet recent historiography has sought
to show that this was less of a clash of civilisations, nor the case of a simple cultural misunderstanding being conflated into an immoveable
diplomatic obstacle; it was in fact more a case of a deliberate and wilful
misunderstanding on the part of each party for its own political ends (cf. Hevia). This was ultimately a clash of two imperialist powers with similar colonial mindsets. Thus the British and
the Qing actually had a lot more in common with one another than either of them
openly cared to acknowledge.

In
2007 I was involved with taking an exhibition, entitled ‘Britain Meets the World, 1714-1830’, from the British Museum in London to the Palace Museum in
Beijing (perhaps better known to many of its visitors as ‘The Forbidden City’).
Curated by my colleague, Sheila O’Connell, the exhibition was billed as an
‘examination of how British artists, travellers, scholars, and traders engaged
with new cultures through world exploration.’ It focussed on the 18th
Century and the work of collectors and explorers such as Sir Joseph Banks and
Captain James Cook, as well as the work of the Royal Society, and men such as James Cox, Josiah Wedgwood, and James Watt. The exhibition also contained a showcase
that was filled with some of the original gifts which Macartney gave to
Qianlong in 1793 and which are now part of the Palace Museum’s collection. It
was fascinating for me working inside the famous ‘Forbidden City.’ I was
fortunate enough to spend several weeks there over the course of the year,
exploring parts of the palace complex which are off-limits to the public – I
even rode a bicycle from one end of the Palace to the other, just as Puyi is
famously depicted doing in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 film, ‘The Last Emperor.’
Interestingly enough, the exhibition was itself very much all part-and-parcel
of the modern ‘cultural diplomacy’ which is increasingly taking place today.
The exhibition was a direct result of the first ever cultural agreement between
the UK and China, which was signed in the presence of the then Prime Minister
Tony Blair and Premier Wen Jiabao in 2005. At the time, reporting on the
opening of ‘Britain Meets the World’, The China Daily newspaper stated that: “Cultural
cooperation and exchange are as vital as any other relationship between
cultures … the more we understand each other the less we will clash. This is
truly the message of culture.”Evidently
Lord Macartney’s gifts are still serving a quasi-‘diplomatic role’ some 200 years after they were first given to China; hopefully
remembering them and thinking about such historic encounters will indeed help to shape a
better and less confrontational future … but then again, as the recent misunderstanding of cultural symbols evidenced in the wearing of Remembrance Day poppies during David Cameron's 2010 trade mission to China reminds us, diplomacy remains - even today - the most delicate and nuanced of arts.