The letter from King George had been rendered into Chinese with the assistance of the European missionaries in the capital. Their translation preserved the king’s language of lofty admiration, even amplifying it, so what Qianlong actually read was not just that he was “worthy to live tens of thousands and tens of thousands thousand years” from the original but also that he “should rule” for that long, an endorsement that was absent from the original. The translators also weeded out potentially offensive references to Christianity, deleting for example a reference by the king to “the blessings which the Great God of Heaven has conferred upon various soils and climates.” Furthermore, they rendered the letter into standard honorific form, elevating the word “China” one line above the rest of the text whenever it appeared, and elevating all references to the emperor three lines above the rest. In the form in which Qianlong read it, the letter scarcely appeared to come from the pen of a sovereign who considered himself to be Qianlong’s equal.53
Macartney was nearly overcome by the ornate pageantry of the audience tent—the tapestries and carpets, the rich draperies and lanterns, “disposed with such harmony,” he wrote in his journal, “the colors so artfully varied.”54 It was as if he were inside a painting. The “commanding feature” of the ceremony, he recalled dreamily, was “that calm dignity, that sober pomp of Asiatic greatness, which European refinements have not yet attained.” The only flaw to intrude upon Macartney’s Orientalist reverie was that he was not the only ambassador in attendance. There were in fact several others from various tributary states, including six Muslims from near the Caspian Sea and a Hindu from Burma, “but,” he noted jealously, “their appearance was not very splendid.” Unlike Macartney, they all readily performed the kowtow.
The most unexpected moment during the audience, in which the British would take great pride, was that Qianlong offhandedly asked Heshen if any of the English could speak Chinese. That was when George Staunton’s son stepped forward. Thanks to his studies with Padre Cho and Mr. Plumb on board the Lion, the sickly boy had mastered a few phrases of Chinese, and now he climbed the steps to the throne and bravely put them to use with the emperor. Young George did not say much (according to his own diary, “He wanted I should speak some Chinese words to him, which I did, thanking him for his presents”),55 but it was enough that his father and Macartney could come away from the audience believing that the twelve-year-old boy was a prodigy who had impressed the elderly sovereign with his fluent mastery of the Chinese language. The truth be what it may, the boy’s words were certainly enough to charm, and Qianlong gave him a small embroidered purse from his own waist as a token of his esteem.56 Little George Staunton was thus anointed as the first Englishman since James Flint to cross the wall of language between Britain and China. Whether he wanted it to or not, that moment would set in play his entire future career.
After the audience, Macartney and his retinue were allowed to stay at Jehol for a few days. They took part in the emperor’s birthday banquet, viewed the gardens, watched a fireworks display, and attended several opera performances—one of which, unbeknownst to them, was an idealized drama of the British embassy in which the narrator at one point announced that “the country of England, gazing in admiration at your imperial majesty, sincerely presents tribute to your court.”57 Soon, however, they were told it was time to leave Jehol and go back to Beijing. On September 21, the day of their departure, yet another of Macartney’s entourage died, a gunner named Reid. Perhaps to console himself, Macartney blamed it on the dead man’s intemperate appetite, noting disapprovingly that Reid had eaten forty apples that morning at breakfast. But even if Macartney refused to entertain the likelihood that his entourage suffered from a contagious disease, his hosts did not, and a certain amount of the hurry with which they were urged along was, according to gossip in the palace, because the emperor worried that the members of the British embassy might infect his court.58
Meanwhile, down in Beijing, the mechanist-mathematician-balloonist Dinwiddie had been busy preparing all of the instruments and scientific demonstrations for the return of the emperor from Jehol at the end of September. With help from the European missionaries of the capital who acted as his interpreters, he filled a grand hall of the imperial palace just outside the city of Beijing with the embassy’s planetarium, lenses, lustres, globes, clocks, air pump, and reflecting telescope. He didn’t envy the missionaries at all. It wasn’t just that they had agreed never to return home, or that they were so strictly limited in where they could travel, but also their letters were read, and as foreigners they were especially susceptible to the intrigues of the court and could be ruined at whim. It was a distasteful and pathetic existence. But at least they were company, and could help him with interpretation. Before long, though, they seemed to grow tired of helping him, and then stopped coming altogether. He had no way to know it, but they had been ordered to have no more contact with the embassy.59
After much scrambling to assemble the lenses in their various frames and set the gigantic planetarium in motion, Dinwiddie had everything ready for the emperor’s visit. The gifts were all arrayed along one wall of the palace hall, “a very Beautifull appearance, much admired by the Chinese,” thought young Staunton, who saw them along with some of the palace servants when he got back from Jehol.60 The emperor, however, would not be quite so admiring. He came to view the display on October 1, when the arrangements had only barely been finished. To Dinwiddie’s eye (as he secretly watched the emperor’s reflection in a mirror), Qianlong showed no particular emotion as he toured the hall. After looking at the lenses and reflecting telescope for what Dinwiddie judged to be about two minutes, he pronounced them “good enough to amuse children,” and left.61
The emperor was finished, but at least the “Grand Choulaa” Heshen and some of the court officials came back to watch Dinwiddie’s demonstrations. He started with a few mechanical experiments and the air pump, to little effect. A second round of demonstrations included showing how the giant lens could be used to melt copper coins. Heshen used it to light his pipe as a joke, much to the delight of his entourage, and seemed disappointed to learn that it could not be used to incinerate an enemy’s city. The high point of the afternoon was when a eunuch stuck his finger into the beam and burned it, to great merriment all around.
But that was it. Dinwiddie had planned on conducting several more days of demonstrations leading up to the grand finale of his hot-air balloon flight over Beijing. Likewise, Macartney had expected that he and the gentlemen would winter over in the capital so he could continue his “negotiations” before eventually returning to Canton in the spring.62 Instead, without warning, on October 6 the emperor ordered the entire embassy to leave immediately, before the cold should set in. Everything had to be packed up at once—no small feat since many of the larger shipping crates had been broken up and reworked into furniture by the embassy’s carpenters. There would be no diving-bell demonstration. Dinwiddie would not get to strike awe into the people of China by floating over them in a balloon, impressing them forever with Britain’s mastery of the natural world. Instead, the lustres and planetarium were hastily broken down and shoved back into their remaining packing boxes by the palace staff—despite the protests of a near-hysterical Dinwiddie that they weren’t being careful enough.
For the other members of the embassy, it was every man for himself through a frantic night of repacking their trunks and crates, trying to find space to store the new gifts they had received, arguing by gesticulation with Chinese servants whose language they couldn’t understand. Then, on October 7, the whole affair was over, and the embassy was sent from the capital. It was on the way out from Beijing that it finally dawned on them that the mission was not in fact a success. Rather, they were being turned out on their collective ear. As one embittered British servant put it, “We entered Beijing like paupers; we remained in it like prisoners; and we quitted it like vagrants.”63 Palace servants were already tearing down all the decorations i
n the guest quarters before the British had even left the grounds.64
Macartney had no idea how deeply he had offended the emperor with his “negotiations.” As early as September 10, four days prior to the audience, Qianlong was already so furious about the English ambassador’s dithering over ritual and his attempts to drag out his time in Jehol that he issued an edict to his ministers of state expressing “great displeasure” with the British and declaring that he would no longer show them any extra favors. They could keep the gifts that were planned for them, he said, and hold the meetings that had been promised, but otherwise they were cut off. He said that he had originally planned to let Macartney stay for a while to enjoy the sights in Jehol, but given the “presumption and self-importance” displayed by the English ambassador, he had decided that Macartney and his retinue should be sent from Jehol immediately after the banquet, then escorted from Beijing after having a day or two to pack their belongings. “When foreigners who come seeking audience with me are sincere and submissive, then I always treat them with kindness,” Qianlong wrote. “But if they come in arrogance, they get nothing.”65
The surface politesse of entertaining the embassy had gone ahead despite the tension behind the scenes, but on a practical level Macartney’s mission was doomed; he just didn’t realize it yet. On October 3, a few days before they were ordered out, Macartney received Qianlong’s response to the letter from King George: an edict on imperial yellow silk, rejecting all of the British requests. Fortunately for Macartney, he couldn’t read it. The request to have a British ambassador remain at the capital, said Qianlong, was (in the language of the translation later prepared for the king) “not consistent with the Customs of this our Empire, and cannot therefore be allowed.” Qianlong acknowledged that foreign missionaries had been allowed to live in Beijing, but pointed out that anyone wishing to adopt such a position “must immediately put on the Chinese dress, dwell with the Society assigned to him, and cannot return to his Country.” Such an arrangement, he observed, even if he approved it for Macartney, would be quite contrary to what the king hoped to achieve. Trade was in fine hands, said Qianlong, and there was no need to change more than a century of precedent just to please one country.66
Qianlong pointed out that he had already given the British embassy an abundance of gifts, and they should simply be grateful and go home. As far as the British presents, on which the Company had spent so much money and about which Macartney had worried for so much of his voyage, Qianlong noted that he had accepted them not because he actually wanted them, but merely as “Tokens of your own affectionate Regard for me.” In truth, he went on, “As the Greatness and Splendor of the Chinese Empire have spread its Fame far and wide, and as foreign Nations, from a thousand Parts of the World, crowd hither over mountains and Seas, to pay us their Homage, and to bring us the rarest and most precious offerings, what is it that we can want here?” In words that would sting the British for a generation, he added, “Strange and costly objects do not interest me. . . . We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”67
Because he could not read the edict at the time and did not understand the rejection it contained, Macartney remained hopeful. Later that same day he pressed for a letter to be given to Qianlong, translated into Chinese by Mr. Plumb and copied by little George Staunton, in which he listed even more boldly than before his primary requests: for new ports to be opened to the British; for an island on the coast they could use as a storage depot for their goods; and for privileged and protected terms of trade in Canton, among other concessions. The emperor’s response to that letter—in a second edict addressed to the king of England—was, as one might expect, even more blunt. It coincided with the order for the British embassy to leave, and Macartney received it on his way out from the capital.
The essential, underlying point of Qianlong’s second edict was that Great Britain had no leverage with him. He laid out the long-term economic relationship of the two countries in his own terms. “The products of our empire are abundant,” he wrote to King George, “and there is nothing we do not have. So we have never needed trade with foreign countries to give us anything we lacked.” However, he went on, the tea, porcelain, and silk that China produced were “essential needs” for countries like England that did not have them, and so out of grace the dynasty had long permitted foreign merchants to come to Canton to purchase such goods, “to satisfy your needs and to allow you to benefit from our surplus.”68 Trade, in other words, was—and had always been—entirely a favor on China’s side. England, he reminded the king, was only one of many countries that came to trade in Canton, and if he gave Britain special treatment, then he would have to give it to all the others as well.
Nevertheless, Qianlong did not propose to punish King George for his naiveté in making these requests, and he noted that it was entirely possible Macartney had acted without the king’s permission. Instead, Qianlong expressed his sympathy for remote England—whose people, he observed, were so unfortunate as to live far away beyond an expansive waste where they were ignorant of the civilization of China. So he did not revoke any of Britain’s existing privileges, but he did go through every single one of Macartney’s requests to explain in each case why he could not possibly grant them. He also suggested that the British had betrayed their own ignorance by even making such requests in the first place.
Macartney had entertained extremely high hopes, and his failure to gain advantage in the Chinese court burned him. He wound up having quite a lot of time to brood on things before he sailed home, for it turned out that Captain Gower had been forced to take the Lion back down to Macao for the sake of his crew, a huge number of whom were sick, and so there was no ship waiting to convey him back to the south (the Hindostan remained, but Macartney complained that there wasn’t room on it for everyone, and the crowding would only worsen the chances of disease).69 With the emperor’s permission, Macartney and his companions were escorted on a two-month inland journey along canals and rivers and over mountain passes to Canton—repeating the slow passage of James Flint after his farewell to the Success in 1759.
In Macartney’s journal after Beijing, on the way back down to Canton empty-handed, his earlier wide-eyed admiration gave way to a new undertone of anger. “Can they be ignorant,” he wondered in late October, “that a couple of English frigates would be an over-match for the whole naval force of their empire, that in half a summer they could totally destroy the navigation of their coasts and reduce the inhabitants of the maritime provinces, who subsist chiefly on fish, to absolute famine?” Separately he fantasized that Britain could, from its territories in India, trigger a revolt in Tibet. Or British naval vessels could destroy the Tiger’s Mouth forts guarding the river passage to Canton with just “half a dozen broadsides.” They could “annihilate” the Canton trade, and the millions of Chinese employed in that trade “would be almost instantly reduced to hunger and insurrection.”70
But—and this was an extremely important caveat—he also realized full well that if Britain showed any aggression toward China, the emperor could simply shut down their trade. Were that to happen, worried Macartney, “the blow would be immediate and heavy,” and the economies of England and British India would suffer immeasurable damage with no recourse. The China trade was the lifeblood of the British Empire, and so he admitted to himself that the idea of showing force or trying to conquer territory in China, no matter how appetizing it might be to his wounded pride, was “too wild to be seriously mentioned.” Given the current state of the two empires, he concluded that the best course for Britain was patience. “Our present interests, our reason, and our humanity,” he concluded, “equally forbid the thoughts of any offensive measures with regard to the Chinese, whilst a ray of hope remains for succeeding by gentle ones.”71
The Macartney mission ended as an embarrassment. Later critics would decry the “strange want of decent and manly spirit by which it was dis
tinguished,” charging that the most prominent feature of this first embassy from Great Britain to China was that it “acknowledged the inferiority of its country.”72 After the Lion and Hindostan returned home, the senior members of the embassy took their time preparing official accounts of the journey for publication, but they were beaten to the press by Macartney’s valet, who quickly published a much more candid account than anything they would write—and unlike Macartney and Staunton, he, as a servant, had no vested interest in upholding the dignity of either the government or the Company. The servant’s unvarnished narrative was an immediate success, going through three reprintings in its first year alone.73
Macartney became a standing joke. Caricatures of him circulated, an awkward figure abasing himself before plump, overbloated Chinese officials. The satirist John Wolcot, writing as Peter Pindar, ridiculed him in a poem titled “Ode to the Lion Ship of War, on her return with the Embassy from China,” which begins:
Dear Lion, welcome from thy monkey trip;
Glad is the Bard to see thee, thou good Ship;
Thy mournful ensign, half way down the staff,
Provokes (I fear me much) a general laugh!
. . .
Say, wert thou not asham’d to put thy prow
Where Britons, dog-like, learnt to crawl and bow?
Where eastern majesty, as hist’ry sings,
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