by John Keay
All these arrangements have, of course, subsequently been minutely scrutinised as bearing on the later status of Tibet. But any temptation to draw analogies between them and the events of the 1950s should be resisted. Qing intervention in Tibet in the eighteenth century was designed to uphold the religious establishment and the spiritual authority of the Dalai Lama, not to undermine them. The Manchu emperors were as sincere in their regard for the reincarnate lamas as were the Mongol khans, and just as jealous of Tibetan endorsement. Arguably Tibetan Buddhism gained more from imperial patronage than did the Qing from political intervention. By the 1750s over a third of all Mongols were monks settled in monasteries. ‘There were nearly 2000 monasteries and temples in Mongolia’, with more in the neighbouring provinces of Gansu, Sichuan and Xinjiang. In Beijing the ‘Three Emperors’ erected or renovated some thirty-two Tibetan temples; one within the inner city became a major centre of scholarship with over five hundred Mongol, Manchu and Tibetan monks.29 Translation of the Tibetan texts into Chinese, Mongol and Manchu was officially funded, and the emperors themselves participated in Tibetan Buddhist rituals. Encouraging a proliferation of incarnate lamas, especially in Qinghai and Mongolia, may have been designed to dilute the influence of the Dalai Lama; but it was also evidence of the vitality of Tibeto-Mongol Buddhism within the empire.
So ended one of history’s great continuums of conquest. Other Qing interventions in Burma, Vietnam and Nepal during the Qianlong period would prove unproductive, even disastrous. The expansionist onslaught launched by Nurhaci and his Jurchen Banners in Manchuria a century and half earlier ended at the Himalayas and in the deserts of Xinjiang. Chinese historians often see it as a restoration of the Han and Tang empires. The empire had reacquired a territorial extent, a capacity even, that was commensurate with the size of its population; a ‘manifest destiny’ had finally awarded China the proportions of a subcontinent; zhongguo had reached its ‘natural’ frontiers. Non-Chinese historians are more inclined to equate Qing expansion into the steppe and the desert with other contemporary colonialisations in Siberia and the Americas. China does not like to be considered a colonial power; but in Beijing’s prompt efforts to demarcate, map and regulate these new regions, to settle their existing populations, to encourage or condone inward migration, and to realise their resources, the criteria of colonialism are discernible. Perhaps, though, what actually motivated Nurhaci and his successors was the legacy of Chinggis Khan and his successors. As the Qing, the Jurchen-Manchus had inherited the universalist claims of Heaven’s Son, as Manchus they had secured Buddhist recognition as the ‘wheel-turning’ cakravartin, but as the Jurchen, a people whose Jin empire had been an early casualty of Mongol expansion, they had assumed the ‘world ruling’ rights of the Great Khan.
15
DEATH THROES OF EMPIRE
1760–1880
SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS
ON THE MORNING OF 14 SEPTEMBER 1793, the Qianlong emperor, third of the Manchu Qing dynasty’s long-reigning ‘Three Emperors’, received tribute-tendering deputations from some of ‘All-under-Heaven’s’ farthest extremities. One came from the Kalmuck (Kalmyk) Mongols on the north-western borders of Xinjiang; closely related to the Zunghars, the Kalmucks had famously migrated from one end of Asia to the other, from Mongolia to the Volga, and then, falling out with the Russians, back again, an odyssey that the opium-eating Thomas de Quincey would recount in his ‘Revolt of the Tartars’. The second deputation supposedly hailed from Pegu, the erstwhile capital of Burma, though it more probably originated in Ava, the seat of the Burmese monarchy. And the third came from London. George Viscount Macartney of Dervock, ambassador and leader of this first ever embassy from a British sovereign to a Chinese emperor, was at pains to emphasise that his mission had nothing to do with tribute. Rather was it an exchange between equals, between ‘the greatest Sovereign of the West and . . . the greatest Sovereign of the East’; and when describing the occasion he somehow managed to overlook the presence of the Kalmucks and the Burmese. ‘I forgot to mention it,’ he politely explains in his journal. A slip of the pen, perhaps, it could have been corrected. But he left it as it was, apparently because ‘their [the Kalmuck and Burmese deputations’] appearance was not very impressive’ when compared to that of the English.
The formal reception was held in a vast marquee within the imperial park at Jehol, the Manchus’ summer retreat north of Beijing and just beyond the Great Wall. Macartney, who had risen at 4 a.m. to dress, chose pink for the occasion. Over a suit of embroidered white velvet, he wrapped himself in the technically ‘crimson’ mantle of satin, lined with white taffeta, that was proper to a Knight of the Bath. An enormous diamond brooch, more starfish than star, was clamped to his breast, further diamonds festooned the badge that secured his lace jabot, a chain (or ‘collar’) of gold medallions weighing a kilogram was strung across his chest, and from his cocked hat, which was also pink, reared a spray of nodding egret plumes. ‘I mention these little particulars’, he explained, ‘to show the attention I always paid, where a proper opportunity offered, to oriental customs and ideas.’1
The Kalmucks, the Burmese, even the emperor, were outdazzled by this apparition. Macartney was doing things in style. His official entourage ran to ninety-five persons, and as presents he brought enough choice British productions to stock a trade exhibition – fine woollens, clocks of exquisite manufacture, guns of every shape and size, glassware, chinaware even, swords, astronomical and musical instruments, oil paintings, a complete planetarium and a hot-air balloon. Two ships, one a sixty-four-gun warship, the other the largest and fastest vessel in the English East India Company’s fleet, had taken a year to convey the mission to the northern port of Tianjin. From there, after a short river journey, the whole circus had been hauled to Beijing in 85 wagons and 39 handcarts, requiring 209 horses and 2,495 porters. Macartney had counted them. It was not excessive for the ‘tribute mission’ that the Qing flags announced it to be; but for an embassy, it was enormous. In fact it was possibly the grandest ever dispatched from Britain.
In keeping with the scale of the thing, Macartney’s diplomatic wish-list was also ambitious. China and Britain were to establish amicable and reciprocal relations. He was to persuade the emperor to agree to his staying on as a permanent British ambassaor in Beijing and to encourage the dispatch of a complementary Chinese embassy to London. Three new ports on the China coast were to be opened to British trade; the numerous exactions to which the existing trade at Guangzhou (Canton) was subject were to be either rescinded or clarified and frozen; a couple of small islands, one within striking distance of Guangzhou and the other at Zhoushan (Chusan) near the mouth of the Yangzi, were to be secured as ‘magazines for unsold goods’ and ‘places of residence’; and the potential of China’s vast market for British manufactures was to be explored.
Macartney did his best. An experienced diplomat and an appreciative guest who went out of his way to cultivate good relations with the Qing officials, he even negotiated the tricky issue of the kowtow; he says he merely genuflected, as he would to his own king. But otherwise he failed dismally. In a parting edict addressed by the emperor to George III and entrusted to the mission for delivery, the British king was congratulated on his ‘sincere humility and obedience’. Any permanent embassy, however, was contrary to ritual practice ‘and definitely cannot be done’. Trade required no such level of representation; there were already channels for redress in the event of disputes; as for island ‘magazines’ and additional ports, they were not so much as mentioned. Knick-knacks such as guns and instruments the emperor did not value, ‘nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures’. In effect, reciprocity with the Celestial Empire remained an impertinent notion as well as a contradiction in terms: ‘You, O King, should simply act in conformity with our wishes by strengthening your loyalty and swearing perpetual obedience so as to ensure that your country may share the blessings of peace.’2
At enormous expense, most of it born
e by the East India Company, the Macartney mission achieved nothing; but it was not therefore insignificant. Allowed to withdraw to Guangzhou via the Grand Canal and the Yangzi before sailing home, Macartney and his colleagues observed something of the Qing empire at the height of its power. His journal, and other publications and paintings arising from the mission, offered English readers a new overview of China and rivalled in their influence the earlier works of Ricci and his Jesuit successors. Even the emperor’s edict, though unbending in its assumption of imperial supremacy and sino-centric ascendancy, has been called ‘the most important single Chinese document for the study of Sino-Western relations between 1700 and 1860’ – no mean claim for a period during which China’s international reputation would plummet as the Western powers presumed to extract concessions and the empire itself started to unravel.3 Macartney anticipated this, his careful observations on the political, social and economic climate being both acute and prescient. Himself humiliated, his visit would come to be seen as the harbinger of China’s humiliation.
Of the three major themes of the Qing period – the successful expansion into Inner Asia, a mixed record in managing the empire and its vastly increased population, and the disastrous handling of the insistent Western demand for commercial penetration – it is the last which has usually received the greatest attention. But as the eighteenth century drew to a close, and with it the long Qianlong reign, intervention by the Western powers still looked remote. As yet, what Macartney called ‘the illegal and contraband trade of opium’ constituted only a quarter of the total value of China’s imports from the British-ruled parts of India; sales of Indian raw cotton were worth more, and though both commodities ‘are now become in great measure necessaries in China’, the trade in neither would be served by hostilities. Macartney noted the shortage of flintlocks and the antiquated nature of China’s ordnance; he foresaw that ‘half a dozen broadsides’ would level the forts that protected Guangzhou, that ‘a few frigates’ could destroy the coastal shipping of the entire country, and that Indo-British forces ‘might vulnerate them [the Chinese] as sensibly in other quarters’, such as along Tibet’s Himalayan frontier. But the cost in terms of lost trade would be disastrous. ‘Our present interests, our reason, and our humanity equally forbid the thoughts of any offensive action,’ he concluded.4
He worried more about the empire’s internal stability, about ‘the breaking up of the power of China’. This too would throw international commerce into confusion while heralding a free-for-all among the trading powers on the China coast. And it was a distinct possibility, indeed ‘no very improbable event’. The Manchu rulers would not ‘be able much longer to stifle the energies of their Chinese subjects’; ‘insurrections’ in outlying provinces were already commonplace; ‘the tyranny of a handful of Tartars [i.e. Manchus] over more than three hunded millions of Chinese’ could not long endure. The empire in the late eighteenth century could best be described as an impressive hulk, ‘an old, crazy, First-rate man-of-war’, that had been kept afloat only by a fortunate succession of able commanders. But in less skilled hands, discipline would collapse and the barque would flounder. ‘She may not sink outright,’ wrote Macartney, ‘she may drift sometime as a wreck, and will then be dashed to pieces on the shore; but she can never be rebuilt on the same bottom.’5
The ship’s commanders whom Macartney so admired were the ‘Three Emperors’ of the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns. But in September 1793, when Macartney met him at Jehol, the last of these was just three days short of his eighty-fourth birthday. He looked younger and was still healthy; but he had already declared his intention of abdicating so that his reign would not outlast and so, in most unfilial fashion, eclipse that of his Kangxi grandfather. The end of an era was clearly nigh. Though clinging to the reins of power beyond his 1796 abdication, the Qianlong emperor would die in 1799; and as Macartney feared, none of his successors would last anything like as long or command a fraction of his authority.
Personal authority was important, although Macartney – better informed about the emperor than about his administration’s short comings – may have exaggerated it. In a bold initiative to short-circuit the formalities, and expand the reach, of ministerial remonstration, the Kangxi emperor had encouraged officials all over the empire to send to him personally, without prejudice to themselves, private memorials on the state of affairs under their oversight. The hard-working Yongzheng emperor had standardised and extended this practice, and the Qianlong emperor had continued it. Both the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors had also undertaken long and sometimes arduous tours by road and river throughout the empire. Recorded in a series of great scroll paintings (twelve to a journey, each scroll being 10–30 metres long for a grand total of 120–360 metres of painted narrative per journey), the tours were no more just ceremonial exercises in seeing and being seen than the scrolls were just pictorial mementoes of the tours. Both celebrated the centrality of the Manchu emperors in respect of their empire and both proclaimed a rather un-Confucian legitimacy based on active rulership.
On tour, petitions were received, impromptu information recorded and on-the-spot inspections conducted. The ‘Three Emperors’ were better informed about conditions in their vast territories than most of their predecessors; and they strove valiantly to improve them. In a Valedictory Edict that carried something of the authority of the Ming Hongwu emperor’s ‘Ancestral Injunctions’, the Kangxi emperor had taken issue with the ideal of the wuwei (‘non-action’) emperor. Far from being immovable icons, the greatest emperors had never rested from their labours. Even Shun, the fourth of the dawn-of-history ‘Five Emperors’, and he who was supposed to have insisted that ‘through non-action one governs’, had died while out on tour. ‘To work as hard at government as [such paragons], to travel on inspection, to have never an idle moment – how can this be called valuing wuwei or tranquilly looking after oneself?’ demanded the Kangxi emperor.6
On the basis of these tours and memorials, vigorous efforts had been made to hold down the burden of taxation on those least able to support it and to grapple with the consequences of the growth in population. At the same time the imperial finances had to be replenished and the efficacy of expenditure on public works improved, both of which had suffered from the disruptive campaigns that had followed the dynastic changeover. One way to increase revenues was to update the tax registers. The Kangxi emperor tried this; but he was not the first and he met with little success. The campaigns in Mongolia and a period of laxity towards the end of his reign left the imperial finances as much in deficit as he had found them.
A more successful approach, adopted by the Yongzheng emperor, was to stem the haemorrhaging of such revenues as were actually collected by clamping down on local ad hoc surcharges and embezzlement. This too had been tried before, but not as aggressively as by the Yongzheng emperor. A central Board of Audit was set up and provincial governors were ordered to investigate the revenue shortfalls and report to the emperor via the confidential system of memorials. When it emerged that without surcharges and other fees the county and district administrations could scarcely operate, a whole new system of apportioning revenues between the central and local government, and of remunerating officials realistically, was introduced. A healthy surplus accrued to the exchequer and ‘for the first time in Chinese history, the state took account of both the administrative needs of officials and the duty of local government to provide . . . public services and infrastructural improvements’.7 The Yongzheng emperor simultaneously pressed ahead with a hoary proposal to incorporate the labour tax (in most areas the duty of corvée had been replaced by a tax payable in silver) with the land and poll taxes. Implementation of all these measures was left to the discretion of provincial governors; they were not draconian exercises in centralised standardisation and the results remained patchy. But they did challenge traditional ideas of gentry-led and community-based self-regulation as championed by degree-holding families, whose fiscal privileges and exempti
ons were specifically targeted. The tax burden was being more equitably distributed, granaries better stocked, canals, roads and irrigation schemes better maintained, and the imperial finances vastly improved; but all at some cost in anti-Manchu sentiment.
Another source of revenue was trade. Under the Qing, encouraging wealth creation was acknowledged as a function of the state, and the Confucian disparagement of merchants and credit agencies became largely rhetorical. With domestic stability, an expanding economy and an improved supply of silver thanks to buoyant exports, internal trade grew rapidly throughout the eighteenth century, encouraging the formation of complex kin-based networks and bringing in substantial revenue in the form of local dues and from the sale of licences and brokerage rights. The state created a favourable economic environment, invested in specific projects such as land reclamation, and creamed off fees and taxes. But it was more a hybrid economy than a command economy. The distinction, for instance, was blurred between, on the one hand, private manufacturers and traders organised into guilds licensed by the state and, on the other, their public sector equivalents engaged under licence in operating state monopolies like those of copper or salt – still a major contributor to the imperial revenues. Even the lucrative collection of maritime customs on overseas trade at Guangzhou (Canton) had been delegated to the private sector. As of a 1707 decree from the Kangxi emperor, several merchant guilds were licensed to deal exclusively with the cargoes of specific ships or nations in return for collecting and remitting the duties payable on them. In respect of the English East India Company, this exclusive privilege belonged to the famous Co-hong group of merchants. Other guild groupings handled Chinese-owned shipping, one for the coastal trade, another for overseas trade.
