Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

Looks down with smiles of scorn on western kings?74

  Macartney did not endure his embarrassment silently, however. He had his own version of events, which centered on the arrogant obliviousness of the Chinese throne. And whatever the results of the embassy may have been, he was now recognized as one of the very few Englishmen qualified to speak of China. His pronouncements after he returned home to England were, if anything, even more resentful than what he had penned on the later part of his journey. He wrote a series of observations for the use of the British government and the East India Company—short essays on China’s people, its economy, its agriculture, science, legal system, and so on—the unifying theme of which was that the empire was far less prosperous or stable than Europeans had previously imagined.

  He had begun to explore this idea in his journal in Canton just before the voyage home. “The empire of China is an old crazy first-rate man of war,” he mused, “which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers has contrived to keep afloat for these hundred and fifty years past; and to overawe their neighbors, merely by her bulk and appearance.” China’s grandeur and power, he came to believe (or wanted to believe), was illusory—or at least, it was a relic from the past that was now lost. “She may perhaps not sink outright,” he wrote, continuing his nautical metaphor, “she may drift some time as a wreck, and will then be dashed in pieces on the shore; but she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom.”75

  His judgment on this matter darkened the longer he thought about it (and, it should be noted, the more bruising his dignity suffered once he was back in England). Against those in the West who imagined China to be a model of stable and virtuous government, Macartney described it instead as “the tyranny of a handful of Tartars over more than three hundred millions of Chinese.” And those Chinese subjects, he predicted ominously—fed at least in part by his own wish to see the Manchu emperor humbled—would not suffer “the odium of a foreign yoke” for much longer. A revolution was coming.76

  He did not stop there. China’s day of reckoning was not just inevitable, he believed, it was imminent. “I often perceived the ground to be hollow under a vast superstructure,” he wrote, “and in trees of the most stately and flourishing appearance I discovered symptoms of speedy decay.” The huge population of ethnic Chinese (that is, the Han Chinese) were “now recovering from the blows that had stunned them; they are awaking from the political stupor they had been thrown into by the Tartar impression, and begin to feel their native energies revive. A slight collision might elicit fire from the flint, and spread the flames of revolt from one extremity of China to the other.” The destruction of the Qing dynasty’s great empire would be a savage affair, he predicted, attended by “horrors and atrocities.” And it would come soon. “I should not be surprised,” he concluded, “if its dislocation or dismemberment were to take place before my own dissolution.”77

  These were words written in resentment and anger by a man who had only traveled in the country for a few months. Macartney knew little of China’s history or the conditions in the interior of the empire beyond the threadlike path of his own journey. He could not speak the language or read the country’s books, he had no network of informants or advisers, and his understanding was irretrievably colored by his own national pride. And yet he would turn out to be more correct than he had any right to be.

  CHAPTER 2

  Black Wind

  The Qianlong emperor had always been larger than life. When he was eleven years old, long before he came to the throne, he was on a hunting trip with his elderly grandfather, the Kangxi emperor, when a wounded bear charged at him. The boy did not move or show any fear. He simply sat there on his pony, cool and impassive, while his grandfather shot the bear and saved his life.1 According to the story that was handed down, that was when Kangxi decided to name Qianlong’s father as his heir, to ensure that this boy—out of all of his dozens of grandsons—would one day rule China. Qianlong was enthroned in 1735 at the age of twenty-four and would rule longer than any Chinese emperor ever had, or ever would again. He presided over massive frontier wars in Central Asia and sponsored cultural projects of a scale unimaginable in the West. (At a time when there were more book titles in China than in the rest of the world combined, he oversaw the compilation of a literary encyclopedia that ran to more than thirty-six thousand volumes in length and would fill a large room.) He was an accomplished and prolific classical poet and a renowned practitioner of calligraphy, and with a firm hand for government and a taste for over-the-top displays of power and beneficence he guided the empire to its apex of prosperity.

  The first Qing rulers had begun the work of carving out their empire’s borders after the conquest of Beijing from the Ming dynasty in 1644. Over generations they expanded westward into Central Asia, beyond the original heartland of the fallen Ming, assimilating new territories in the southwest and the island of Taiwan to the east. But it was not until Qianlong’s reign in the eighteenth century that the Qing Empire reached its fullest flower, largely setting the boundaries for the Chinese state that exists today. At its peak under Qianlong, the empire reached all the way from Manchuria in the northeast to the provinces of Guangxi and Yunnan in the southwest, and from Taiwan off the eastern coast deep into Central Asia with the territories of Xinjiang and Tibet in the far west. It was an empire of four and a half million square miles, larger than all of Europe put together.

  When Macartney came to pay his respects, Qianlong was just turning eighty-two. He was a sturdy man with drooping eyes, slight jowls, and a long mustache. His reign had been long enough that he was the same ruler who sat on the throne at the time of James Flint, the same who had originally ordered British trade confined to Canton. By the time of the Macartney embassy, Qianlong had ruled China for nearly fifty-eight years. He was not alone in his longevity either, for his grandfather Kangxi had reigned for sixty-one years, from 1661 to 1722, the two of them forming the backbone of one of the most powerful dynasties in China’s long history.

  No matter what impression the British were left with, Qianlong was no narrow provincial. The pointed line in his edict to King George III that “strange and costly objects do not interest me”—to say nothing of his dismissal of Dinwiddie’s lenses and planetarium as “sufficient to amuse children”—were primarily a matter of posturing. He had learned the virtue of outward indifference to exotic foreign objects from the Book of Documents, one of the Confucian classics, which said, “When he does not look on foreign things as precious, foreigners will come to him; when it is real worth that is precious to him, his own people near at hand will be in a state of repose.”2 Privately, however, Qianlong was deeply fascinated by Western inventions. He had a cherished collection of seventy intricate English clocks gathered over the years, and had written poetry on the loveliness of foreign glass as well as several poems about telescopes. He periodically addressed edicts to the customs commissioner in Canton asking him to send European goods or artisans to the capital. He was a patron of the Catholic missionaries he employed at court as astronomers and cartographers, and though he allowed them little freedom, he valued the skills they brought. When James Dinwiddie was assembling the scientific equipment that Qianlong would so publicly dismiss, he did so without knowing that the emperor had actually ordered the missionaries to watch closely what Dinwiddie was doing so they could replicate his work after he was gone.3

  Qianlong was likewise a connoisseur of European art, and had in the past kept an Italian named Giuseppe Castiglione as court painter to create European paintings of Chinese scenes for him, even portraits in oil of the emperor himself. In the 1740s he commissioned Castiglione and a French Jesuit to design and build a grand series of marble buildings in his palace outside Beijing in a rococo European style, replete with fountains and soaring columns, the rooms of which he decorated with Western artifacts. So he was scarcely unappreciative of European manufactures or aesthetics, and in any case he had in his lifetime experienced far more contact with Europeans than any k
ing of England ever had with subjects of China. Above all, though, Qianlong knew the value of China’s foreign trade at Canton, because a significant portion of the tariff income it generated went toward underwriting the lavish expenses of the imperial household.4

  On the larger scale of the imperial economy, foreign trade was crucial during Qianlong’s reign because it was the empire’s primary source of silver—of which China was the largest net importer in the world, and had been since the 1600s. Foreign traders, mainly British and later American, brought silver dollars in exchange for some of the tea and silk they purchased at Canton, and from there it circulated inland, where it helped to stabilize what would otherwise have been a precarious economy. For two contrary forces were at work in the China that Macartney visited. The first was that the population had risen dramatically over the preceding several decades. Thanks to the general peace and prosperity that marked Qianlong’s reign, families bore increasing numbers of children. Hardy new crops imported from the New World like corn and sweet potatoes allowed the cultivation of formerly unused land, which in turn made it possible for more of those newly born children to survive. The result was an unprecedented population boom during Qianlong’s reign, in which the population of the empire doubled in size between the 1740s and the early 1790s. By 1794 there were between three and four hundred million people living in China, or one-third of the entire world’s population.5

  The other, contrary, force at work during Qianlong’s reign was the state’s inability to increase its revenues in proportion to the rapid growth of the population it had to govern. Roughly 80 percent of the government’s income came from land taxes, which were assessed on farmers and landlords independently of how many people actually lived on a given parcel. In 1712, Qianlong’s grandfather, the Kangxi emperor, in a grand gesture of confidence in his dynasty’s rule (as well as to win support from influential landowning gentry), had promised that the land taxes would never be raised again. Qianlong, as Kangxi’s grandson, was bound by filial piety to respect that promise. But by the late eighteenth century, that meant that the dynasty’s primary source of revenue had barely risen with the conquest of mostly inarable new territory, while heavy population growth in China’s fertile southern and eastern regions had led to dangerous overcrowding in the cities, great pressure on the land, and a broad migration of settlers into less hospitable regions of the country that lacked established government oversight. With such strict limits on its tax revenue, the dynasty was unable to expand the size of the government bureaucracy to levels appropriate for maintaining control over such a large and shifting population. In that context, the steady flow of silver coming in at Canton from foreign trade, as one of the few alternative sources of government income, became all the more crucial for undergirding a system that was threatening to burst at the seams.

  The combination of a growing population and a stagnating government also caused a crisis for the hundreds of thousands of literate elites in the empire who hoped to become officials. For more than a thousand years, officials in China had been chosen for government work on the basis of anonymous examinations that tested their knowledge of the Confucian classics. The hope behind that system was that those who served in government would, by such means, gain their positions purely by virtue of their own personal talents, rather than through family connections or the influence of wealth. Furthermore, as Confucius had placed the virtues of loyalty and righteousness at the center of his teachings, successive emperors trusted that officials who had been indoctrinated from youth with Confucian morals would, once they were posted to their jobs in the provinces, prove loyal and righteous even without direct supervision from the capital.

  To outsiders, the Chinese examinations had always been one of the most admired facets of Chinese civilization. Eighteenth-century French philosophers hailed them as a model of meritocracy free from the pernicious influence of heredity or the church. Voltaire wrote, “The human mind certainly cannot imagine a government better than this one where everything is to be decided by the large tribunals, subordinated to each other, of which the members are received only after several severe examinations.” Montesquieu, admiring how China’s scholar-officials were steeped in Confucian morals, wrote that they “spent their whole youth in learning them, their whole life in the practice. They were taught by their men of letters, and . . . China was well governed.” In the mid-eighteenth century there had been calls in British popular magazines to establish a meritocratic exam system in England like the one in China, a wave that would culminate in 1806 with the East India Company’s establishment of a competitive exam of its own in London, inspired largely by what its traders had learned of the Chinese system in Canton. The Company’s exams selected men for service in India, and would in turn become the foundation of the British government’s own civil service exams when they were established in the mid-nineteenth century.6

  For all the admiration of the Chinese examinations by outsiders, however, by the late eighteenth century the system was beginning to fail. It had always been extremely difficult to pass the exams, but as the population expanded in the Qianlong reign there were far more candidates than before who wanted to take part in the competition, and proportionally fewer government jobs with which to reward them. The competition became more and more fierce, and great numbers of talented candidates were left behind, creating a glut of highly educated men with few career prospects. They generally found unsatisfying work as tutors, secretaries, and bureaucratic underlings, unreliable jobs that required a high level of literacy and education but were transient and depended entirely on the patronage of their individual employers. These men were failures in the eyes of their parents, many of whom had spent lavish sums on their sons’ educations in hopes of their becoming officials and bringing power and prestige to the family.

  Furthermore, even those scholars who did manage to pass the examinations might still have to wait ten or twenty years before a position in the imperial bureaucracy opened up to them through normal channels. By consequence, the system of civil appointments became fertile ground for bribery schemes. Those who controlled the appointments demanded huge fees from qualified candidates before they would give them a position—in essence, forcing them to purchase their jobs, and then often making them pay yearly sums to hold on to them. As the practice spread, great numbers of officials began their careers in heavy financial debt to their superiors—debts they were expected to make up for by squeezing bribes from their own inferiors or finding other ways (such as embezzlement) to supplement their meager salaries and pay for the fees and gifts that were required of them.

  At the lowest levels, where the vast imperial governing apparatus reached the level of the common people, this pyramid of graft resulted in widespread petty oppression and outright cruelty by minor officials towards the populations they governed—especially the peasants and those on the margins of society, who were most vulnerable to their extortions. Such victims had little or no effective legal recourse if they were harassed or beaten or had their meager property taken by greedy officials. All they could really do, if they were desperate enough, was to revolt.

  In the spring of 1794, as the Lion was departing from Macao for its voyage back to England, a rumor was making its way through the mountainous counties of north-central China that a “True Master” had appeared in Shanxi province. The Master was marked, it was said, with the character for the sun imprinted on his left hand and the character for the moon on his right—together they formed the character “Ming,” the name of the previous dynasty (and thus a marker of rebellion against the Qing). According to the rumor, a great boulder in the village of the Master’s birth had suddenly split open one day, revealing a scripture hidden inside that read:

  A black wind will blow for a day and a night.

  It will destroy men beyond number.

  White bones will be piled into mountains, and

  Blood will flow to become an ocean.7

  An apocalypse was coming, said tho
se who carried the rumor through central China. The only way to escape destruction was to memorize the scripture from the rock and begin chanting it—and then to start stockpiling guns, swords, and powder in preparation to support the Master’s uprising. A date was set for the spring of 1796, two years later, when the black wind would blow and all would rise up together to destroy the world of old and usher in a new age.

  A peasant named Zhang Zhengmo, who lived in a remote, mountainous county of western Hubei province in north-central China, was one of many who heard the rumor that spring and believed it.8 He was thirty-two years old at the time, and heard it from an itinerant sect leader named Bai from a northern county, who explained to him that the True Master’s doctrine was a branch of the White Lotus teachings. White Lotus sects had been around for hundreds of years in rural China, a loose conglomeration of religious groups with certain shared tenets from Buddhism and Daoism but a variety of competing teachers. Most of the time, the White Lotus sects were harmless, their practices centering on promises of faith healing and protection from misfortune. But their religion was also, by varying degrees, a millennial one: it contained a prediction of apocalypse, and its followers believed in a second coming of Buddha, who would return in the form of a bodhisattva named Maitreya to destroy the world of corruption and suffering. Maitreya would annihilate the government and the disbelievers and build a new utopia to reward those who helped bring about the “turning of the kalpa,” as the coming apocalypse was called.

  This undercurrent of potential violence in the religion was well known to the government, for White Lotus sects had sparked uprisings of various sizes all the way back through the Ming era—some even linked them to the rebellion that brought the Ming dynasty to power in the first place. The new strains of the religion that began to emerge in the early 1790s—around the time of Macartney’s visit, though far from the regions where he and his entourage traveled—were, however, far more virulent than most. Their message was more urgent, their appeal more attractive in a time of uncertainty.