Padre Cho left them at Macao. He feared being arrested by the Qing government for having gone abroad, so he went ashore and refused to continue on to Beijing with the embassy. Only Mr. Plumb, in his European disguise, stayed on as interpreter, though a few Chinese-speaking European missionaries hitched a ride from Macao, hoping to gain residence in Beijing where thirty or so French, Italian, and Portuguese Catholics had been retained over the years as technical advisers to the emperor. Those missionaries in the capital served as mathematicians and astronomers for the most part, and they were strictly forbidden to proselytize. They also had to relinquish any claim on ever returning home, so it was a lifelong calling with little hope of success or remuneration. Nevertheless, there had always been a few who felt driven to join their number.
With approval to proceed, the embassy began working its way up the coast. They were now off their charts, and the coastal features had no European names, so they went ahead and named them after themselves—Cape Gower, after the captain of the Lion. Cape Macartney. Staunton’s Island. When they stopped for provisions and to take on pilots, the Chinese officials they encountered seemed welcoming and ready to meet their needs. Still, their course was not smooth. A gale blew up as they plied the Yellow Sea off north China, pitching the ship so violently that two more men were lost overboard, one of them a musician from Macartney’s band. After the wind calmed, the fog settled in, blocking all view of land, or the ships of each other. As night fell the Hindostan hove to rather than risk, as one passenger put it, “a thick night in an unknown sea, and where islands so unexpectedly appear.” Disease was spreading on the ships. Two of Macartney’s guards died. More than a hundred men were on the Lion’s sick list.32
With so much at stake after the long and treacherous voyage, and after such a massive investment of capital in the ships, crews, passengers, and gifts, Macartney was determined that nothing should go wrong. As the Lion and Hindostan neared their final landfall, he sent around instructions on how to act in China. In them, he admonished everyone—crew, officers, passengers—to be on their absolute best behavior. They now represented Great Britain, he told them. Their conduct in China would determine how their countrymen would be treated there in the future. The whole success of the embassy depended on “gaining the good-will of the Chinese.” But past tensions at Canton had, he was told, convinced the Chinese that the British were “the worst of the Europeans,” and so it was the job of every man on the English ships to display “conduct diametrically opposite” and impress the Chinese anew with England’s great civilization.33
The Chinese, Macartney explained in his instructions, were a fiercely unified nation where even the lowest members of society “were supported by their superiors in all their differences with foreigners.” It was a country where those in power were “ready to avenge [the] blood” of any of their subjects who suffered conflict with an outsider. So he insisted that even with the poorest people they encountered, his men must exercise “caution and mildness in every intercourse or accidental meeting.” If anyone dared to commit a crime or harm a Chinese person while in the country, he warned, they should expect no help from him.34
Along with worrying about the conduct of those who accompanied him, Macartney also fretted constantly about whether he might make a wrong impression himself. On that count, the possibility that the gifts might be insufficient nagged at him. As the Lion sailed up the coast he coerced various gentlemen into giving up personal objects they had brought along (which they had intended to sell for profit at Canton) and donate them to the general pool of embassy gifts. To his horror, he later found out that in addition to the general embassy gifts, he was also supposed to bestow his own personal gifts on the emperor and the emperor’s sons and some of the ministers, and he didn’t have anything for them. So he pressured the captain of the Hindostan into selling him several watches he had brought along.35 Macartney would never have classified Britain as a lesser power, but China was an empire to be reckoned with—vast in size, politically unified, prosperous almost beyond imagination. And so Lord Macartney, the first Englishman to visit the court of China’s emperor, came as a supplicant, hoping to gain favor by his good behavior.
All of the worries, the preparation, and the endless voyage seemed justified as the Lion finally touched shore in north China and the long-dreamt-of land came into view. Macartney was overcome with delight. He imagined himself entering some unknown Eden, gazing enchanted at lands never before seen by European eyes. In his diary he noted the beauty of fields that “smiled under the hand of industry.” The buildings appeared to him like drawings from books, built in an exotic style “by no means displeasing to the eye.” But it was the people who really captivated him: throngs of half-naked children who ran along the shore to watch the ships, full-grown men “well-looking, well-limbed, robust and muscular.” He imagined himself Shakespeare’s Miranda. “How beauteous mankind is!” he wanted to bellow over the water. “Oh, brave new world that has such people in it!”36
The Lion and Hindostan were too large to continue once they reached the mouth of the shallow White River, so Macartney gave Captain Gower orders to wait for him with the ships at the island of Chusan partway down the coast, and they began offloading their cargo into flat-bottomed junks the Chinese provided for their inland journey. The men of the embassy wilted in the late-summer humidity, mosquitoes buzzing relentlessly around them, the air thick with the smell of mud and decay. But some indication of the hospitality they were to receive at court came as they took on supplies. They were given provisions, compliments of the emperor, that included twenty bulls, one hundred sheep, one hundred pigs, a thousand fowls, several thousand melons and pumpkins, one thousand cucumbers, one hundred and sixty sacks of rice, huge quantities of flour and steamed buns, and twenty-two crates of dried peaches. Some of the foodstuffs were suited to a different cuisine than the British were accustomed to, but they soon discovered that the soft Chinese steamed buns weren’t so bad if you sliced them up and made them into toast.37
The embassy made its grand entrance into China on the White River, sailing on a fleet of thirty-seven imperial junks with a military escort. People ran out from villages to watch them, men and women alike—the men with shaved heads and long braids, the women with their feet bound (and not hidden away from sight as the British had expected; Macartney’s artist noted that they “stumped along as publickly as they would in any country town in England”). When the wind ran against their course and they could not make sail, trackers on shore hauled the ships upriver manually, phalanxes of strong men leaning forward into harnesses of wood, singing as they pulled together. The soldiers of the military escort marched on the banks alongside, matching pace with the junks. When the ships anchored for the night, the soldiers pitched camp on the opposite shore, keeping watch through the dark from their bonfires. In the towns they passed, musicians played for them with horns and drums and gongs, and at the great city of Tianjin, soldiers at attention lined the banks of the river for a full mile.38
From Tianjin, the embassy sailed onward to the canal terminus of Tongzhou, where their baggage was offloaded onto carts and wheelbarrows for the overland leg to Beijing. They would stop at the capital only briefly, though, for the emperor had gone north to his summer residence in Jehol to escape the heat, and they would need to follow him there. It would be another six-day journey northward beyond the capital. They left the fragile scientific gifts in the imperial palace outside Beijing, fearing they might be broken by further travel, and James Dinwiddie stayed behind to oversee the assembly of the planetarium and lens displays so the emperor could view them when he came back to Beijing in the fall. After resting for a few days, they continued onward to the north, passing on September 5 through a gate of the Great Wall of China. The wall was crumbling, for it had been built to keep out the tribes of the north, but now one of those tribes ruled the empire, so it served no defensive purpose anymore. Little George Staunton helped himself to a few stones that had fallen from i
t. Macartney was impressed; he reckoned the wall to be “the most stupendous work of human hands,” probably greater in extent than all of the other forts in the world put together. Its construction, he remarked in his journal, was a sign of “not only a very powerful empire, but a very wise and virtuous nation.”39
Beyond the Great Wall, they continued northward into Manchuria—or “Tartary,” as they called it—the original realm of the emperor’s people. Here, they found a much smaller population and a complete absence of large towns. The hills were sharp, reminding Macartney of the Swiss Alps. The air was cooler than in China proper, crisp in the mornings, and the route wended darkly through shadowed mountain valleys, ascending slowly northward toward the summer residence of the emperor. They bumped along roughly on unsprung wooden carts over roads meant more for horses and footmen than carriages, past sparse forests of dwarf oak and walnut trees that dotted the southern faces of the slopes, past villages of isolated hill people who stared silently at them. They stopped for rest one night at a nearly abandoned palace, an imperial way station that seemed home only to squirrels.40
Macartney continued to worry about the gifts. As they traveled north, Mr. Plumb told him that in Tianjin there had been a report that the British were bringing along several magical gifts for the emperor. Among them were supposedly an enchanted pillow that could transport you to faraway countries in your sleep, a living elephant the size of a cat, a songbird as big as a chicken that could eat six bushels of charcoal a day, and several twelve-inch-tall men “in form and intellect as perfect as grenadiers.”41 The imaginary gifts may have sounded more marvelous to Chinese ears than planetaria and lenses, and Macartney tried to laugh off the report, but it did risk the emperor’s disappointment if he should look in vain among Macartney’s crates for the little men and enchanted pillow that were promised.
At last, an early departure on September 8 brought them into range of the emperor’s summer quarters. They had been traveling for nearly a year since their departure from England in the autumn of 1792, and the success or failure of the embassy would likely be decided in the next few days. They stopped a mile from the imperial residence to primp and reassemble themselves for presentation, then set forth for the final leg of the journey in a makeshift parade formation with as much pomp as they could muster. The English soldiers and cavalry led the way on foot, followed by a two-by-two procession of servants, musicians, scientists, and various gentlemen. Bringing up the rear were the elder George Staunton in a palanquin, and finally the ambassador himself, accompanied by young Staunton, in a post-chaise trailed by a little turbaned African boy one of the gentlemen had brought along.42
The earnest paraders arrived around ten in the morning at their designated quarters, a low-slung palace of wood and stone with eight great steps leading up to it. But no one was there to greet them. Macartney had been given to believe that he would be welcomed on arrival by the imperial minister of state, a Manchu named Heshen whom the British knew as the “Grand Choulaa” (there was in fact no such title, though it would take Western diplomats about fifty years to confirm that).43 However, Heshen was nowhere to be seen. Macartney assumed that he must have been delayed for some reason and would be along shortly, so the soldiers made preparations to fall into line, and the British traveling party arranged itself in formation in front of the building, waiting ceremoniously to greet the “Grand Choulaa” when he arrived. An hour passed that way. Then another hour, and still he did not come. Most of the time they just stood there waiting for him, though occasionally they would launch into an abortive parade if someone important-looking approached nearby, but none of them turned out to be him. After six hours of standing in formation with no sign of the imperial minister, they finally lost heart and went inside for their dinner.44
In the end, it was Macartney who had to go find the “Grand Choulaa” himself, which set an uncomfortable tone for the opening of relations. Nevertheless, over the next several days, mountains of gifts were exchanged. The British presented their rugs, woolens, and cottons. The emperor’s representatives in turn gave them an abundance of luxurious fabrics—velvets, silks, satins—along with embroideries, hundreds of fans, jade, a huge assortment of expensive porcelain, lacquerware, and large quantities of top-quality tea.45 It was in these gifts, however, that we find the contradiction at the heart of the embassy. For the British sought to impress. They brought the finest products of their science and technology, their burgeoning industry, and their purpose was to awe the Chinese with their advancement. But this was not how embassies traditionally worked in the Qing Empire. When embassies from neighboring countries came to Beijing—from Thailand, Vietnam, especially Korea—they came to trade. While Macartney wished to negotiate for more advantageous policies in the future, and hopefully gain approval to station a permanent British minister in the capital, for the Asian diplomats who came to visit the emperor the embassy itself was the opportunity for trade. Thus the large quantity of high-quality trading goods that the emperor gave to the British—the silks, the porcelain, the tea. He expected that these were what they wanted above all, so they could bring them home and sell them.
Furthermore, the embassies that came from tributary states like Vietnam and Korea did not come to impress the throne; they came to seek the emperor’s approval, which gave them political power back home. To demonstrate their government’s legitimacy in the eyes of the powerful Qing emperor was (at least in China’s eyes) to argue for their own sovereign’s right to rule in his own country. And to gain this approval, they paid tribute. They readily performed the so-called kowtow before the emperor in the manner of his own ministers—a prescribed ritual of nine kneeling bows to the ground (three sets of three) to humble themselves in his presence. And it made perfect sense to do so, because in their recognizing the supremacy of the emperor of China, the eminent power in Asia, he would recognize their supremacy within their own, smaller countries. Whether or not such emissaries actually considered their own countries to be inferior, it was still in their best interests to follow the court’s protocol. But such a relationship could hardly have been further from Lord Macartney’s expectations, and it was on this issue of ceremony that the weak pageantry of the British embassy began to unravel.
Initially Macartney did not realize that he was supposed to prostrate himself before the emperor. Nor, when it was explained to him, was he willing to do so. Despite his great admiration for the prosperity and civilization of the Qing Empire, he viewed Qianlong as an equal to the king of England, entitled only to the same show of respect he would give to his own sovereign. Since Macartney would not perform anything so abject as the kowtow before his own king, he felt he could not do so before Qianlong either. In any case, he expected that the ceremony would be waived in his case, and submitted a request to that effect in advance, which he had been told was approved. But on the embassy’s arrival at Jehol, Heshen denied ever having seen the request, and insisted Macartney should perform the full kowtow before the emperor. Imperial officials assured Macartney that it was just for show, “a mere exterior and unmeaning ceremony,” and urged him to go forward with it.46
The negotiations were thorny. Macartney insisted that he would “readily” perform the ceremony of nine kneeling bows as long as it was reciprocal—that is, if a Chinese official would do exactly the same before the king of England (or rather, before the portrait of King George that Macartney had brought along).47 Failing such reciprocity, he insisted there should be a different ceremony for “equal” states like Britain (as he, but not they, considered it), to distinguish his own powerful country from mere tributary states like Korea. In that vein, he proposed to bend on one knee before Qianlong and bow his head once, as he would do for the king of England. To Macartney’s great relief, that proposal was accepted. He could now look forward to his audience with the emperor, to productive discussions of new trade privileges, and hopefully to a long residence in the capital. And that was to say nothing of what he expected would be the heightened
respect for the English more widely in China once it became known that their ambassador—theirs alone—did not have to kowtow before the emperor.48
After a few more days of waiting, Macartney finally learned that the emperor would see him on September 14, nearly a week after their arrival. Heshen the “Grand Choulaa” still had never come to Macartney’s own residence to pay his respects, which was irritating from a protocol standpoint, though lesser officials consoled Macartney that Heshen hadn’t visited only because there wasn’t enough room in Macartney’s quarters to fit his entourage (also, they said evasively, he had hurt his foot).49 But now that didn’t seem to matter; the British diplomat would have his audience with the emperor of China, and the members of the embassy could finally enjoy a taste of success in their mission.
At three o’clock in the morning on the appointed day, the ambassador was whisked away in a palanquin, dressed in his full regalia of mulberry velvet suit, diamond star, and plume of feathers. He was followed through the dark by his suite and musicians, also done up in their best, who tried to march in formation behind him until they realized they couldn’t keep up with the quick-footed Chinese porters who carried Macartney’s litter, at which point they began running after him, breaking ranks as they got mixed up in various herds of pigs and donkeys that crowded the early-morning road.50
The servants, musicians, and gentlemen in their sweaty disarray were abandoned near the entrance to the emperor’s ceremonial tent. Macartney entered, carrying above his head a jewel-encrusted golden box containing the letter from King George, accompanied by George Staunton in a scarlet Oxford gown (calculated, as misguidedly as Macartney’s own outfit, to win the admiration of the “scholarly” Chinese), as well as Staunton’s son and Mr. Plumb their interpreter.51 By Macartney’s own account, inside the tent he ascended the steps to the emperor’s throne, knelt on one knee as agreed, and presented him with the box (also, awkwardly, some of the watches). The emperor did not seem in the slightest chagrined that the ritual had been changed. The elder Staunton later wrote that Qianlong’s eyes were “full and clear, and his countenance open,” in contrast to the “dark and gloomy” demeanor they had expected.52
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