Anson shouted his perceived ill-treatment from the rafters when he returned to Europe, which encouraged the growth of negative stereotypes about the Chinese as well as awareness that further diplomacy was needed. To this end, the East India Company sent James Flint, a country trader familiar with both the Canton trade and the Chinese language, to the Qing capital to present the rapidly accumulating grievances of the British. Despite restrictions on foreign travel beyond Canton, Flint managed to reach Tianjin and forward his petition on to Peking. The emperor at first agreed to investigate the British complaints but then had Flint arrested for breaking the restrictions on foreigners sailing to ports beyond Canton, for circumventing the usual procedure for submitting petitions, and for illegally learning Chinese. Flint would spend three years in a Chinese prison.
British aggressiveness was not the sole reason for suspicion about their present embassy. Chinese merchants and migrants, like their European counterparts, had also gone forth into the wider world in search of profits, spreading across the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean. The emperor had certainly heard enough from these expatriates to be wary of Europeans and the slippery slope from trade to conquest. From Chinese settlers in the Philippines, Taiwan, and Batavia he would have heard of the terrible suffering of the Chinese at the hands of the Spanish and Dutch. In 1740, more than 12,000 Chinese residents of Batavia—men, women, and children—were massacred when the Dutch governor, angered by their refusal to pay an extortionate fee leveled upon them, accused the Chinese community of plotting to overthrow Dutch rule. Barrow, who was horrified by Dutch treatment of the industrious Chinese of Batavia, called the massacre “one of the most inhuman and apparently causeless transactions that ever disgraced a civilized people,” a sentiment with which the emperor would have surely agreed (though perhaps less so with the characterization of the Dutch as “civilized”).4
British disgust notwithstanding, there was little reason for the emperor to suppose that they would behave any differently than their fellow Europeans. Indeed, British India might well have presented a timely warning. They had, after all, arrived in the great empire of the Mughals just as they had in China, as supplicants, merely seeking permission to trade. But by the time Macartney’s mission arrived at Jehol, the toehold of trade had been rapidly transformed into a territorial empire, with native rulers transformed into supplicants or toppled altogether. As yet there had been no evidence of British designs on Qing territory, but rumors had begun to trickle in from the frontier between China and British India of British intervention in the internal affairs of the emperor’s domains.
It was well known that Warren Hastings had sent an emissary from Bengal to Bhutan and to the Panchen Lama at Lhasa in Tibet in both 1774 and 1782 as a means of opening up trade with Tibet, but also in an effort to establish a new trade route into China that would circumvent the Canton system. Sending emissaries to a rival source of religious authority in such a sensitive and restive border zone was bad enough, but even more recently there were reports that the British had sent military aid from Bengal to Ghurka invaders and Tibetan rebels. Chinese officials questioned Lord Macartney closely about this on multiple occasions during his visit, and though he vociferously denied any British involvement, many among the emperor’s party, especially the celebrated General Fu-k’-ang-an who had personally led the fight against the Tibetan insurgents, were convinced that the British posed a threat to the integrity of China’s borders.5
That the British would resort to arms to defend their interests there was little doubt. In 1784 the Lady Hughes, a British ship plying the country trade, had fired a salute upon entering Canton harbor, as was customary among Western ships. Unfortunately, the salute went awry and two unsuspecting Chinese were killed by the errant shot. Under Chinese law a violent death, even an accident, necessitated the death of the man responsible, unless clemency was granted. The local authorities thus demanded that the captain of the Lady Hughes hand over the man responsible. The captain was understandably at a loss to identify exactly which gunner had fired the fatal shot, and so refused to hand over anyone. In response, the Chinese seized the ship’s supercargo as collateral and, in a move that suggested that they believed all Westerners in some way culpable for the actions of the British, ceased all trade in Canton. Alarmed at this turn of events, the Westerners—British, French, Dutch, Danish, and even Americans—banded together and sent their ships fully armed to protect their factories and warehouses. The Chinese were not intimidated by this show of force, however, and continued to demand the culprit be handed over. With their livelihood at stake, the Europeans gradually abandoned the British (the Americans, led by Samuel Shaw, were oddly the last to remain in support), who were forced to hand over the man most likely to be responsible. Despite British pleas for mercy, the poor gunner was strangled to death in January 1785.6
With this in mind, the emperor made sure that the British embassy was under constant surveillance, their movements shadowed and restricted, their mail opened and read, and their contact with Chinese civilians limited. The embassy’s interest in fortifications, including the Great Wall, was noted with considerable unease, and the ambassador’s rather too casual display of British artillery firepower greeted with discomfort, alarm, and suspicion. These were a dangerous people, but they were also an important source of silver, and so they would be placated with the singular honor of an audience with the emperor.7
The official audience on September 14 went as smoothly as could be expected, despite the mutual misunderstandings. The emperor was clad in a “loose robe of yellow silk, a cap of black velvet with a red ball on the top, and adorned with a peacock’s feather . . . [he wore] silk boots embroidered with gold, and a sash of blue girded his waist.” The British ambassador, resplendent in his scarlet robes and plumed hat, refused to perform the appropriate rituals of submission. This was perhaps a sign of British arrogance, a confirmation of the emperor’s concerns about their intransigent ambition, but for all that was made of this breach of protocol by his officials, and by European observers, it merely offered a handy public justification for what had already been decided long before the embassy reached Jehol. Despite the outward stability of his long reign, the Qianlong Emperor was keenly aware of the fragility of his realm.8
The massive Qing Empire had been built by conquest, but empires so built are apt to overextension and vulnerability on their borders. The Qianlong Emperor had spent much of his reign stabilizing his frontiers, but still his domain was no exception to the dangers of expansion. Beginning in the 1760s, the Qing Empire faced a series of crises that threatened to bring down the façade of stability. The Qing had always considered Southeast Asia to be within their sphere of influence, and repeatedly intervened in the affairs of these supposedly tributary nations, with disastrous results. Between 1765 and 1769 China launched four invasions of Burma, losing men and money to no real effect. The lesson clearly not learned, in 1788 China attempted to intervene in the civil war then raging in Vietnam. The Chinese army succeeded in taking Hanoi and proclaimed the restoration of the Lê Dynasty, but mere months later were driven out of Vietnam by an Nguyen army at a huge cost. These attempts to tamp down fires that had broken out in the crucial border zones, were only made worse when Gurkhas from Nepal invaded Tibet in 1790 (perhaps aided by the British). Qing armies successfully drove the Gurkhas back almost to the border with India, but again the costs were enormous. If this were not enough, the Russians, fresh from their seizure of the Crimea, had begun to test the borders with China, causing real concerns that Russia too had designs on China’s frontiers.9
The insecurity of China’s borders might have been easier to bear if internal stability reigned, but there were major problems developing within China as well. Perhaps a result of his ancestor’s golden age, the population of China had risen rapidly across the eighteenth century after years of decline in the troubled years of the mid-seventeenth century. Recovery quickly turned into runaway growth, and by the time of Macartney’s arriva
l, the population of China had more than doubled. This demographic expansion had dire consequences for the internal stability of the empire. Pressure on land grew as more people clamored for property, leading to smaller landholdings, landlessness, and migration, all of which increased poverty and undermined government control of the population. As more and more land was brought under cultivation, and new imported crops were adopted (corn and potatoes especially), the countryside was deforested, the soil began to erode, rivers silted, and floods, always a scourge of a civilization so closely tied to great rivers, became more frequent and deadly. Like their rural countrymen, China’s elites were also gradually alienated. As the population grew, there were not enough positions in the bureaucracy to meet the demand of an elite who relied on such positions for their livelihood. Elite joblessness, combined with growing corruption and frustrations over the favoritism shown Manchus at the expense of the majority Han population, led to elites becoming divorced from the administration they normally helped maintain.10
Internal dissatisfaction turned rapidly to civil strife. An outbreak of sorcery accusations roiled the countryside in 1768, leading to fear and executions as people looked for scapegoats to explain their struggles in a changing world. In 1774, in Shandong Province, the White Lotus Rebellion saw anti-tax rebels, members of a secret religious society with ancient roots, rise up and take three cities, then besiege the strategically important city of Linqing before being violently suppressed. In the 1780s another rebellion burst forth in Taiwan when the anti-Manchu Heaven and Earth Society captured several cities and proclaimed a new dynasty. Beginning in 1784, two major fundamentalist Muslim revolts began in Gansu, with the tribal Miao people of the south-west also rising up.
The rebellions were successfully suppressed, but the anxiety and hopelessness of the age had other detrimental effects. Unemployed and disillusioned, many, starting with the elite, took to smoking opium. As demand increased, the British began to flood the market with Indian opium, leading to declining prices and mass consumption of the drug, thus began one of the great drug epidemics in modern history, with the number of addicts rising to perhaps a million or more. And if it were bad enough that opium was flooding into a vulnerable country, it was also becoming apparent that tea, China’s cash crop that had for decades brought huge quantities of silver to buoy the Chinese economy, was now instead being purchased with China’s own silver, the proceeds of Britain’s opium sales. With the people becoming enslaved by opium’s deadly allure, and the trade balance beginning to shift in Britain’s favor, it would have been natural to wonder exactly what benefit China received from its trade with Britain. Even the Hong merchants increasingly found themselves in debt to the British. With his borders threatened, his people restless, and his trade undermined, the Qianlong Emperor was hardly being intransigent when he refused Britain’s demands and sent her embassy packing. The outsiders could very well destabilize an empire that seemed balanced on a knife’s edge. This was not an immobile empire, but a fragile, fractured, anxious empire.
With this in mind, the Qianlong Emperor sent a letter of response to King George III of Britain:
You, O King, live beyond the confines of many seas, nevertheless, impelled by your humble desire to partake of the benefits of our civilisation, you have dispatched a mission respectfully bearing your memorial. Your Envoy has crossed the seas and paid his respects at my Court on the anniversary of my birthday. To show your devotion, you have also sent offerings of your country’s produce . . .
Surveying the wide world, I have but one aim in view, namely, to maintain a perfect governance and to fulfil the duties of the State: strange and costly objects do not interest me . . . Our dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. 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 . . . It behoves you, O King, to respect my sentiments and to display even greater devotion and loyalty in future, so that, by perpetual submission to our Throne, you may secure peace and prosperity for your country hereafter . . .
Your England is not the only nation trading at Canton. If other nations, following your bad example, wrongfully importune my ear with further impossible requests, how will it be possible for me to treat them with easy indulgence? Nevertheless, I do not forget the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea, nor do I overlook your excusable ignorance of the usages of our Celestial Empire.
Unaware of the internal issues confronting the Qianlong Emperor, Europeans took the letter’s dismissive, condescending tone and its repeated mentions of breached diplomatic norms at face value. They thus ascribed the failure of Macartney’s mission to his refusal to prostrate himself before the emperor and on a more general Chinese inflexibility and backwardness. Still smarting from his very public humiliation, when Macartney returned to Britain he joined this critical chorus and placed the blame for his failure squarely on the Chinese. He famously compared the Qing Empire to an aged, faltering ship, quipping:
The Empire of China is an old, crazy, first-rate Man of War, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers have contrived to keep afloat for these hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbours merely by her bulk and appearance. But whenever an insufficient man happens to have the command on deck, adieu to the discipline and safety of the ship. She may, perhaps, not sink outright; she may drift some time as a wreck, and will then be dashed to pieces on the shore; but she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom.11
Macartney and the members of his embassy had more direct experience of China than anyone else in Britain, and thus their assessment of China and its rulers held real weight. As such their reports and views went a long way toward convincing the people and nations of Europe, who had once held China up as a model of stable, successful imperial governance, that China could not be reasoned with diplomatically, that the best policy was to circumvent any and all restrictions on trade wherever possible, and that force was more likely to succeed where diplomacy had failed. Just as the American War had helped transform British attitudes toward the Mughal Empire from admiration to disdain, the debacle of the Macartney embassy began a sea-change in British attitudes toward China. This shift in perception would in turn help Britain justify an increasingly belligerent policy toward China. Barrow’s hoped-for empire of morality and free trade was not to be, replaced by imperial expansion built on a foundation of force-fed opium. For China, the embassy would mark the beginning of what came to be known as “the century of humiliation.”
John Barrow had been left behind in Beijing to arrange and assemble the embassy’s gifts to the emperor. Though he regretted missing the trip to Jehol, preparing the presents was no simple task. Complex scientific and astronomical instruments, with delicate, precise mechanisms and fragile materials, had to be constructed in the emperor’s palace, requiring expertise and close supervision. This work filled most of Barrow’s hours, with little time for sightseeing, but even in Beijing, in the midst of his labors, troubling news about the embassy began to reach his ears. On October 19, two days after the emperor’s birthday—honored in Beijing by ritual prostrations before the empty throne—Barrow found himself locked out of the audience hall in the imperial palace. Everyone seemed in a sullen mood; no one would speak to him. Finally, he was informed by a friendly missionary that all was lost. Lord Macartney had refused to perform the kow-tow ritual.
Barrow’s informant reported that none of the officials at Jehol considered the affair a serious matter and that a compromise had been reached that served the interests of both parties well enough, but in Beijing the officers and administrators were “mortified, perplex[ed], and alarmed.” They feared that the scandal would “tarnish the luster of his [the emperor’s] reign, being nothing short of breaking through an ancient custom, and adopting one of a barbarous nation in
its place.” By accepting the compromise, the emperor, the physical manifestation of the empire, had allowed himself to be dictated to by a foreign power, demeaning the nation and undermining its fervently held belief in its unchallenged status as the center of the world. For Barrow and the British in Beijing, the change in mood was night and day. The princes and officials who had previously flocked to see the foreigners and their gadgets now stayed away, the friendly eunuch who had guided them through the palace now called them all “proud, headstrong Englishmen,” and the fabulous meals that had weighed down their tables with the sheer multitude of dishes were now replaced by simple fare. And so it was with mixed feelings that Barrow learned that the embassy was to return to Beijing on September 26.12
On September 30, the reunited embassy trudged a few miles back up the road to Jehol to participate in the ceremonial welcoming of the emperor, returning to Beijing for the winter. The road was lined on both sides with painted lanterns and crowds of officials and onlookers, a trumpet blast and music announcing the emperor’s arrival. For Barrow, the return of the emperor to Beijing meant an official review of the presents he had so lovingly assembled. For Lord Macartney, it meant, or so he hoped, the beginning of the real work of negotiation now that the formalities had been rather painfully dispensed with. However, though the gifts met with official approval, Macartney’s attempts at diplomacy were repeatedly stonewalled.
Macartney knew from experience that diplomacy was a slow process, and he was fully prepared to take the long view of things, to reside at Beijing for months or even years until the details of a treaty could be hashed out. The early setbacks were certainly frustrating, but he believed that his proposals were in the best interests of both empires, and that eventually an understanding would be reached. Britain desperately needed to expand its China trade if it were to recover from the American War. It rapidly became clear, however, that the Chinese reticence was not a negotiating tactic. Only a few short days after they had returned to Beijing, Macartney was informed that the embassy was to leave the capital in short order. Embassies to China had never been permanent, as in the European model, a few weeks usually being the standard timeframe allowed. With the harsh winter weather of Beijing fast approaching, the emperor had set their departure date for October 7. For all the Chinese insistence on concern for custom and for the health of the British party, Macartney was at last convinced that the prospects for fruitful negotiations were at an end. There was little left to do but limp home.
To Begin the World Over Again Page 59
