Since Flint was the complainant, though, he was made responsible for seeing the accusations through. The emperor ordered him to leave the Success and its crew behind at Tianjin, and rather than sail back down the coast with them in the autumn as he had planned, he was to proceed immediately overland to Canton in the company of the imperial commissioner in order to provide him with proof of the hoppo’s corruption. Flint and the commissioner left the next morning, beginning a journey down the north–south axis of the empire along an inland route through China never before traversed by an English-man. Flint did not leave a record of what he saw, but he arrived safely in Canton six weeks later. The Success and its crew, however, would never be heard from again.5
Regrettably for James Flint, it turned out that there was more to the emperor’s response than he knew. The hoppo was indeed removed from office and replaced by someone more honest, but beyond that, the emperor had also been disturbed by Flint’s audacity in circumventing the established channels of communication. In particular, Flint had sailed an English ship into ports where foreign vessels were forbidden, and he had submitted a petition in Chinese directly to the sovereign despite having no rank or status within the empire.
And so it was that another edict arrived, not long after Flint got back to Canton, ordering his arrest for those crimes.6 The local authorities at Canton gladly took him into custody and locked him up in a jail at the edge of Macao. As he languished there for months, and as those months turned into years, the British supercargoes were completely powerless to secure his release—or even to visit him, for that matter. At one point during his long incarceration, the Qing governor in Canton went so far as to write a letter to the king of England extolling the Chinese government’s generosity in merely sentencing James Flint to prison, calling his punishment “such amazingly gracious treatment that he should think of it with tears.” He said that all the British who had come to China for trade “have been so drenched with the waves of the imperial favour that they should leap for joy and turn towards us for civilization!”7
The only sense in which Flint’s treatment might be termed “gracious” was in how it compared to the fate of his Chinese teacher. As the emperor saw it, Flint could not have made his voyage, and thus could not have committed his various crimes, if native Chinese subjects had not helped him learn the language and write the petition. They were the ones most to blame. And so, by the emperor’s further orders, on the same day that James Flint was arrested, his Chinese teacher was taken into custody as well and decapitated.8 The teacher’s head was then hung on display as a public warning to any other Chinese at Canton who might in the future think of helping one of the foreign traders learn their language. Flint was finally released in November 1762, after three years in prison, at which point the local authorities put him forcibly onto a British ship and banished him from China forever, thereby rendering useless the one valuable skill he had managed to acquire in the term of his unfortunate life.
Some Chinese accounts maintain that James Flint died immediately after his release from prison, but he did in fact manage to live on, if obscurely, in England. Sources are thin, but he makes an appearance, happily enough, in January 1770 teaching Benjamin Franklin how to make tofu.9 So his knowledge did not go entirely to waste. Nevertheless, the failure of Flint’s petition and his deportation from China marked the end of any hope that the English East India Company would be allowed to venture beyond the narrow confines of the port of Canton. For more than eighty years after Flint’s arrest—an age handed down to posterity as the “Canton era”—all legal British, French, Dutch, Indian, and American trade with the entire, enormous empire of China was formally restricted to that one single southern port with its tiny, seasonal compound for foreigners. It was the lone point of sanctioned commercial contact between maritime westerners and mainland Chinese, a symbol both of the Qing dynasty’s power to dictate international trade on its own terms and—to the British and other foreigners who suffered the same limiting conditions—of the disdain the emperor felt for them. The East India Company traders had tried to ask for more, but after the dismal outcome of Flint’s petition they realized that the wisest course of action was simply to stop complaining and be thankful for what they had.
There were good reasons why the East India Company did not do anything else that might put their little foothold in China at risk. In the eyes of Europeans in the late eighteenth century, the empire of the Qing dynasty was an unequaled vision of power, order, and prosperity. It had long been, as Adam Smith described it in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations, “one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world.” Smith believed China to have been at a stable climax of development for eons—at least as far back as Marco Polo’s visit in the thirteenth century—which meant that although it did not have the capacity to develop any further (an advantage he reserved largely for Europe), it nevertheless showed no signs of retreating from its pinnacle of prosperity. “Though it may perhaps stand still,” he insisted, “[China] does not seem to go backwards.”10
Enlightenment champions of reason saw in China the model of a moral and well-governed state that needed no church—a secular empire, founded on rational texts and ruled by scholars. “Confucius,” wrote Voltaire with admiration in his Philosophical Dictionary of 1765, “had no interest in falsehood; he did not pretend to be a prophet; he claimed no inspiration; he taught no new religion; he used no delusions.”11 In reading extracts from Confucius’s works, Voltaire concluded, “I have found in them nothing but the purest morality, without the slightest tinge of charlatanism.” The state that had been founded on those works was, he believed, the oldest and most enduring in the world. “There is no house in Europe,” he observed, “the antiquity of which is so well proved as that of the Empire of China.”
China’s political unity in the later eighteenth century was dazzling not just to British economists and French philosophers but to Americans as well, once they began to emerge as a nation of their own. In 1794, a U.S. citizen of Dutch descent, who had served as interpreter for an embassy from the Netherlands to China, dedicated the published account of his voyage to George Washington, celebrating in particular “the virtues which in your Excellency afford so striking a resemblance between Asia and America.” China was for him the standard by which Western countries could be measured: Washington was virtuous because he exhibited some of the qualities of a Qing dynasty emperor. The highest hope that the writer could muster for the future of his new nation was that Washington, in his “principles and sentiments,” might procure for the United States “a duration equal to the Chinese Empire.”12
These were not just Western fantasies. China in the eighteenth century was not only the most populous and politically unified empire on earth, but also the most prosperous. The standard of living in its wealthy eastern and southern cities was easily a match for the companion regions of western Europe, as was life expectancy. To measure by the consumption of luxury goods such as sugar and tea, the quality of life in eastern China in the 1700s appears to have left Europe behind.13 At the same time, however, due to the Qing government’s tight strictures on foreign trade and residence, China was also seen from outside as impossibly guarded and remote, “the only civilised nation in the world,” as one British writer put it, “whose jealous laws forbid the intrusion of any other people.”14 The immense riches of the empire were—to the eternal frustration of westerners—always just out of reach.
The southern port city of Canton, as China’s primary point of contact with the oceangoing West, thus took on an especially intense air of mystery. One early account of the city by a French traveler, published in London in 1615, described Canton as a vast and secretive metropolis, “the principall Cittie of all China, . . . beyond which there is no passage; say any body what hee will to the contrary.” No European had ever made it into China beyond the city of Canton, he wrote, “except (as they say) six Jesuits . . .
of whom there was never since heard any newes, nor is their hope ever to see their returne.”15
British trade in the city had gotten off to an appropriately rocky start in June 1637, when a Captain Weddell arrived off Macao, the Portuguese settlement eighty miles down the Pearl River delta from Canton, leading a small fleet of English merchant ships and bearing a letter from King Charles I requesting commerce with China. The Portuguese refused to allow Weddell’s fleet to land at Macao, so he led his ships up the river toward Canton until they were blocked at the “Tiger’s Mouth,” a strategic strait in the Pearl River with several major forts that guarded the onward passage to the city. Holding back the main body of his fleet, Weddell sent ahead a single, heavily armed pinnace with fifty men on board to “seeke For speech and trade with the Chineses.”16 The pinnace, lacking a native pilot, felt its way carefully upriver until a fleet of twenty Chinese war junks arrived to turn it back. Before making the English leave the river, however, the admiral of the Chinese fleet invited two of them to discuss what they had come for. When the pinnace returned to Weddell’s fleet a few days later, it happily reported that the Chinese admiral, while expressly forbidding them to come to Canton, had promised the British a license to trade alongside the Portuguese at Macao.17
When the Portuguese were presented with this news, however, they still refused to let Weddell’s ships anchor at Macao, no matter what the admiral had told them. After a pause for counsel, Weddell decided to head back up the river and force his way to Canton. This time he sailed his entire fleet up through the Tiger’s Mouth, drawing fire from Chinese defenders on both shores and responding with broadsides of his own. A landing party managed to capture one of the Chinese forts, running up the English colors and looting its guns before burning down all of the buildings inside. During a lull in the fighting, the Chinese invited a few of the English to come up to Canton for negotiations, but the talks soured and several men were taken prisoner. Captain Weddell then proceeded to make war, “laying waste towns and villages,” as one account put it, “and burning several of their vessels.”18 In the end, the Chinese capitulated and said they would allow the English to trade directly at Canton. Weddell’s spirited efforts proved unnecessary, though, for the Ming dynasty collapsed just seven years after his voyage and Canton was largely destroyed during the wars of Manchu conquest that followed the founding of the Qing dynasty in 1644. It would be nearly eighty years before English trade with Canton could be established on any kind of a regular basis.19
Even as Captain Weddell tried to open trade in Canton at gunpoint, he had no idea how important this port would eventually become to his country. Notably, it was one of the merchants who sailed in Weddell’s fleet in 1637—Peter Mundy by name—who left the first written record of an Englishman drinking a cup of tea. Just before the hostilities broke out, Mundy noted that some locals along the Pearl River “gave us a certaine Drinke called Chaa” (“cha” being the Chinese name for tea), “which is only water with a kind of herbe boyled in itt.” He wasn’t terribly impressed, noting clinically, “It must bee Drancke warme and is accompted wholesome.”20
Weddell’s merchants had come in search of sugar and ginger at Canton, and tea was an unknown product. But by the time the East India Company began sending its ships to China in earnest in 1717, along with purchasing the more familiar commodities of copper, porcelain, and raw silk, the ships’ masters were also instructed to bring back “Tea as much as the Ship can conveniently stow.”21 By 1725 the Company would be importing 250,000 pounds of tea into England from Canton per year, displacing silk as the primary object of trade with China. Through the eighteenth century Britain’s appetite for the drink continued to grow at an enormous rate, and the import figures kept climbing, growing nearly 10,000 percent by 1805, at which point the Company would be shipping home 24 million pounds of tea per year. It became England’s national beverage, “practically a necessary of life” as some in government described it, and in 1784, Parliament passed a law requiring the East India Company—which enjoyed a complete monopoly on all British trade with China—to hold a year’s supply of it in strategic reserve at all times.22 The only place in the world where the British could obtain their tea was in China, and the only place in China they could buy it was in Canton.
So it would remain, quietly, for thirty years after Flint’s arrest, until the autumn of 1792—when the British government, flush with pride in its rising industrial revolution, and hoping that the emperor might finally be convinced to reconsider his limitations on foreign trade, took it upon itself to send an emissary to China to try to open the country’s gates for real.
PART I
Gracious Spring
CHAPTER 1
A Time of Wonder
On the morning of September 26, 1792, several days of cold English rain came to an end, a light wind picked up from the north, and HMS Lion, a sixty-four-gun ship of the line, unfurled its sails and weighed anchor to depart the harbor at Spithead. It was a time of peace for Great Britain, and the First Lord of the Admiralty felt he could spare the vessel for a two-year voyage to China to ensure that Lord Macartney, the ambassador who sailed on board, would arrive at the court of the Chinese emperor in a suitably impressive fashion.1 The Lion carried four hundred passengers and crew, and was accompanied for its journey by the Hindostan, a fifty-six-gun East Indiaman (a merchant ship of the East India Company’s fleet, armed as well as many a naval man-of-war), which carried the members of Macartney’s large entourage who couldn’t fit as passengers on the Lion, as well as most of the six hundred crates and packages of cargo that he was bringing to China as gifts for the emperor. If the voyage should meet with success, Macartney would be the first ambassador from Great Britain ever to pay his respects in China; his lone would-be predecessor, a Lieutenant Colonel Charles Cathcart, had sailed from England five years earlier but died at sea on the long outbound journey.2
Macartney had had a long if somewhat rocky career as a diplomat. A courtly and determined man with a square jaw and sharp eyes, he had been knighted at age twenty-seven and in his younger years served as an envoy to Russia, where he would have been made ambassador if he hadn’t managed to seduce not one but two women of Empress Catherine’s court while in the country.3 By the time of the embassy to China he was middle-aged and a bit on the portly side, but still considered a fine example of British manhood. Since Russia, he had served as governor of Grenada and spent a contentious term as governor of Madras. At the end of his service in Madras he was offered, but declined, the governor-generalship in Bengal. Macartney was proud and optimistic, and imagined himself fully prepared to accommodate the strange customs and practices of the country to which the king now sent him.
In excited anticipation of the Oriental splendor of the Chinese court—at least as he had read about it in fanciful accounts and extrapolated from his experiences in India—Macartney had prepared the most colorful and grandiose outfit he could muster: “a suit of spotted mulberry velvet,” as his valet described it, “with a diamond star, and his ribbon; over which he wore the full habit of the order of the Bath, with the hat, and plume of feathers, which form a part of it.”4 Dressed up like a peacock, he felt certain to make a grand impression in a country that he, and most of his entourage, to say nothing of his countrymen, had only ever encountered in their imaginations.
Macartney’s mission was a joint venture of the British government and the East India Company, the latter of which bore its costs. Its primary goal was the expansion of British trade into Chinese ports north of Canton—the same request James Flint had brought to the emperor more than thirty years earlier, with such discouraging results (though some, including Macartney himself, believed that if Britain had sent a royal ambassador to Beijing back in 1759, rather than a mere interpreter, things might have gone differently).5 Nevertheless, the situation for British traders in China had improved considerably in the intervening years. By 1792, the East India Company’s share of the Canton trade had grown to eclipse that
of all of its continental rivals. The young United States had sent its first trading ship to Canton in 1784, almost immediately upon achieving independence, but compared to the mighty fleet of the East India Company, which sent six ships to Canton for every one of theirs, the upstart Americans still posed no competition worth speaking of.6
Best of all for the East India Company, in 1784 the British government had dramatically lowered its tariff on tea imports to combat smuggling from Europe, reducing the tax from upwards of 100 percent to a flat 12.5 percent across the board, so profits were pouring in. The Company’s tea imports had tripled, and British cotton textiles were selling well to Chinese merchants in exchange. The London Times in 1791 noted hopefully that the China trade was “in the most flourishing state. All English Manufactures find a ready sale there; and the Chinese begin to think that our cottons are superior to their own.”7 Thus the Company itself was actually quite lukewarm about the embassy. Its directors were comfortable in their supremacy, suitably rich, and deeply aware of precedent (or rather the lack thereof) in their direct relations with the Chinese throne. They worried that any new requests from Britain might be taken as impertinence, offending the emperor and damaging rather than advancing their trade in Canton. But industrialists in northern England were demanding expanded markets for their goods, so an optimistic home secretary made sure that the mission went forward against the Company’s misgivings.8
The sailing routes from England to Macao and Canton in south China were well known thanks to a long history of direct trade, but the Lion’s planned course beyond Canton, up the coast of China and through the Yellow Sea to Beijing, was as yet uncharted by European sailors. So to command the Lion, Macartney chose a Royal Navy captain, Sir Erasmus Gower, who had been around the world twice and was experienced at the careful business of navigating large ships through unknown waters. No expense was spared; the government gave Gower the freedom to choose all of his own officers, of whom he brought an outsized complement of what one member of the embassy proudly described as “young gentlemen, of the most respected families, glowing with all the ardour and enterprise of youth.”9
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