On being called into the chairman’s office, however, Staunton was instead informed soberly that the directors felt it would be inappropriate for the British embassy to be led by an employee of the East India Company. The embassy was intended to represent the king of England, not the merchants, and they believed Staunton’s presence would confuse the issue. The news came as a withering shock. Even forty years later when writing his memoirs he still burned from his “mortification” on that day, certain he had been “extremely ill-used” and probably “the victim of some unworthy intrigue.”4 At the time, the only salve for his wounded pride was of the spiteful kind: the plans for that mission were eventually scuttled, so at least nobody else got to be the ambassador to China.
In spite of the setback, Staunton continued working to build his reputation as Britain’s first real authority on China. In 1810, during the same visit home, he published the translation of the Qing legal code he had been working on for nearly a decade. It was the first major work ever to be translated directly from Chinese into English and greatly strengthened his claim to expertise. Though the book’s importance, it should be noted, had less to do with the details of the code itself or the quality of the translation than with what it sought to reveal about China on the larger scale. Of all the texts Staunton could have translated, he believed that the legal code provided the best possible window into the workings of Chinese society, containing within its lines the “system and constitution of the Government, the principles of its internal policy, its connection with the national habits and character, and its influence upon the general state and condition of the people in that country.”5
At the time when Staunton published his book, the admiring visions of China that had been current at the time of the Macartney mission were on the wane in some quarters. The seeds of disaffection had been planted by the publications from that very mission, some of whose members hinted that China was not the faultless vision of Eastern perfection they had expected. Macartney’s own grim predictions of a coming revolution in China, though unpublished while he was still alive, had recently been made public along with other portions of his China diary after his death in 1806.6
At the same time, the years of war against France, intensified by British anti-Catholic sentiment, had tarnished the old Jesuit accounts of China that French Enlightenment philosophers had used to celebrate China as a model of stable and enduring government. In the Napoleonic era, British distrust of the French bled over into distrust of Frenchmen from the past—especially those like Voltaire whose writings also lay behind the Revolution. As one British writer put it in 1810, “Nothing can exceed the gullibility of the French philosophistes, except that of those who were misled by them.” Under the illusions cast by French writers about China, he went on, “the world remained pretty generally persuaded of the vast perfection to which the Chinese nation has attained in the progress of the sciences, and especially in the arts of government, until the embassy of Lord Macartney, and the accounts of that embassy . . . open[ed] the eyes, of Englishmen at least, to the imposture under which they had laboured.”7
With his book on Chinese law, Staunton acted as a British successor to the continental Jesuits of earlier centuries, casting China in a more flattering light for his own era. His view of the country was on the whole a positive one (as perhaps it could only be, given the degree to which he had yoked his career to it). He described China in the book’s preface as an empire that was relatively enlightened, ruled by laws that were clearly defined and (for the most part) rational. It was obviously very different from Europe, he wrote, but there was a great deal for Europeans to admire in its civilization. Along with what he saw as the disinclination of China’s government to conquer foreign countries, he singled out for praise “the sobriety, industry, and even intelligence of the lower classes,” “the almost total absence of feudal rights and privileges,” and “the equable distribution of landed property.” All of these positive features of Chinese society, he explained, derived from “a system of penal laws, if not the most just and equitable, at least the most comprehensive, uniform, and suited to the genius of the people for whom it is designed, perhaps of any that ever existed.”8
Staunton wanted especially to set China apart from—and above—the other “Oriental” civilizations of South Asia and the Near East with which Western readers who didn’t know better might confuse it. Though he never questioned the superiority of Britain, he felt that the shortcomings of China’s civilization were primarily due to its lacking Christianity. Otherwise, he argued, China was clearly superior to the other cultures of the Orient, including India. He disputed a recent theory advanced by a missionary in Bengal that the Chinese language had originally derived from Sanskrit: to the contrary, argued Staunton, China’s great legacy of written history, its calendars, its inventions, and its technology had no counterpart among the Hindus. While the Chinese had been in possession of “a code of laws, founded on good sense and practical wisdom” for a very long time, Hindustan was, as he described it, a “miserable country, where passive millions drag a feeble existence under the iron rod of a few crafty castes.”9 And as for the Chinese government of his own day, Staunton depicted the Jiaqing emperor as a sober and talented ruler, a decisive monarch whose destruction of Heshen displayed a “political courage and sagacity which are requisite in the character of a monarch of a great and powerful empire.”10
A few of the reviewers followed his lead. The Quarterly Review carried an especially glowing evaluation of Staunton’s work, calling it “an extraordinary book in every point of view.”11 That review, however, was penned (anonymously, as was the practice) by Staunton’s patron and friend John Barrow, the same who had tipped him off that he was likely to be named ambassador—and, awkwardly enough, the man to whom Staunton had dedicated the book. A more objective critic in the Edinburgh Review at least supported Staunton on the superiority of China to other non-Western cultures. He remarked on the “great reasonableness, clearness and consistency” of the Qing code of laws, which he saw as being free from “the monstrous verbiage of most other Asiatic productions—none of the superstitious deliration, the miserable incoherence, the tremendous non sequiturs and eternal repetitions of those oracular performances.” He pronounced it to be “a calm, concise, and distinct series of enactments, savouring throughout of practical judgment and European good sense.”12
Others would not be so kind. Staunton had no control over how the book was interpreted once it was printed, and his translation of the Qing dynasty’s legal code inadvertently stirred up a lurking undercurrent of hostility—not toward Staunton himself, who was generally applauded for his accomplishment—but toward China. The finely detailed laws of the Qing code, with their many gradations of corporal punishment (specifying, among other things, exactly what size of bamboo cane a convict should be beaten with, and for how many times), struck some reviewers as the mark of an empire whose people were no more the beneficiaries of enlightened governance than a common ship’s crew. The Critical Review, for its part, completely upended Staunton’s intention to build a stronger appreciation for China, offering instead that after reading his book, “We are ourselves strongly inclined to consider the Chinese as a much more unimprovable race than any of the South Sea savages.”13
Contrary to Staunton’s own intentions, several of his reviewers discovered in the Qing legal system an unbridgeable divide between China’s civilization and their own. One suggested that to impose such a harsh legal code on people like the British would be “the most base and cruel of all atrocities.”14 Others held that the civilizations of China and Europe were so far removed that their peoples merited (indeed, deserved) to live under completely separate systems of law and punishment. The distinction was not an issue of sovereignty but of race—the justness of the particular legal system depended on the nature of the individual being judged, not on where he or she might at that moment reside, or what government ruled that territory. It was but a short step from there
to a further conclusion—one that these writers did not broach, but others would in time—that even on Chinese soil it would be nothing short of atrocity to hold an Englishman subject to Chinese law.15
Robert Morrison was dismayed by what he saw all around him in Canton. Idolatry. Incense-burning. Moon-worship. A people damned by their ignorance of Christ. He was not a lighthearted man, nor a forgiving one. Portraits of the missionary show him with a faint smile on his lips, muttonchop sideburns reaching down his jaw, a shock of curly black hair brushed back from his round face. In one, he is attended by Chinese assistants bent over their papers and working so diligently that they can’t, apparently, take the time to look up at the portraitist. It is unclear how much he actually smiled, though. He was a relentlessly driven man whose calling was the subject of ridicule, even hostility, from many of his fellow westerners.
“And so, Mr. Morrison,” a ship’s owner once teased him, “you really expect that you will make an impression on the idolatry of the great Chinese empire?”
“No, sir,” replied the humorless Morrison. “I expect God will.”16
Morrison’s mission was founded on the expectation that he would never be allowed into China proper, so his primary instructions were, first, to learn the written language, and then to translate the Bible into Chinese. Books could travel where preachers could not, and the London Missionary Society had faith that if Robert Morrison could just somehow render the Christian Gospel into Chinese, then China would eventually become a Christian country. In that, Morrison’s new Protestant mission diverged significantly from its Catholic predecessors. The Catholics did not generally believe in translation—converts had to learn Latin if they wanted to read the Bible themselves, and the rituals of the church required that foreign missionaries or ordained Chinese priests had to be present inside the country to attend to their converts, to hear confessions and say mass. In contrast, the London Missionary Society, which represented an inclusive potpourri of Protestant denominations, believed that all a person needed was a book of scripture, in a language he or she could read, and that would be enough to become a practicing Christian. As a preacher in Salem, Massachusetts, put it while raising money for Chinese translation work in 1812, “During the dark days of popery, the reign of mystic Babylon, the Bible had been denied to the laity; it was little read, and less understood by the clergy. At length, being translated and printed in English, it became the grand instrument of the Reformation.”17
The idea for a Protestant mission to China had originated with an English minister named William Moseley who in 1798 sent around a circular calling for the formation of a “Society for translating the Holy Scriptures into the languages of the most populous Oriental Nations”—by which he meant China and India—based on his concern that the great “Heathen Countries” of the world were damned by their ignorance of the Christian Gospel. Until they should have access to the scriptures in their native language, said Moseley, “the three hundred and thirty millions of China . . . will continue to sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.”18
Moseley was inspired by the Macartney mission, which ostensibly proved, by the successful translation of George III’s letter to Qianlong, that accurate translations into Chinese from English could in fact be made—something many had thought impossible. Further encouragement came a few years later, when Moseley discovered in the holdings of the British Museum a manuscript in Chinese of unknown providence, whose Latin description indicated that it contained the four Gospels. In early 1804 when George Staunton was home in England to settle his father’s estate, Moseley engaged him to examine the mysterious manuscript, hoping that if Staunton could read it and determine that it was accurate—and that it didn’t contain any kind of a “popish turn,” as one concerned bishop put it—it could be published and used as the basis for a new China mission. Over the course of several visits to the museum, trying to discern whether the Chinese text had been based on the authorized English text or the Latin Vulgate, Staunton determined in the end, much to Moseley’s disappointment, that it was based on the Vulgate, and probably written by a Jesuit.19
The text at the British Museum being problematic, and the potential expense of publishing a Chinese book in England being in any case unthinkable (in the absence of any kind of Chinese type, an artist illiterate in the language would have had to re-create every single character in the text like a little picture), Moseley’s supporters backed out. There was also a parallel problem that even if the book were published there was no way to disseminate it in China except by way of the Catholic missionaries, who would surely never agree to hand out a Protestant text. Moseley’s plan—on which, he insisted repeatedly, rested the eternal souls of fully one-third of the human race—would only work if there were Protestants in China. So finally the London Missionary Society stepped in to take over the project, and decided that they would send Robert Morrison to Canton to learn the language, to make a full translation of the Bible himself, and eventually to figure out some way to get it published in large numbers and distributed within China. In its own way, it was a more ambitious and impossible-seeming mission than anything a mere explorer like Thomas Manning could have concocted.
. . .
Morrison was less tender than other Christian missionaries of his time, said one man who knew him: “His piety had the bark on—theirs was still in the green shoot.”20 And he was solitary, though not by choice. There had originally been two Protestant missionaries slated to come to China, but the other, a man named Brown, pulled out before their departure because he could not stand working with Robert Morrison. “We cannot be fit associates in the same mission,” wrote Brown to the directors of the London Missionary Society; “as for love and affection, I believe there has been little on either side.”21 Morrison regretted the solitude, and was lonely in China. Almost nobody wrote to him from England. During his first year he sent more than two hundred letters to family, friends, and missionary colleagues. He received just two in return.22
In the autumn of 1808, however, Morrison found love. Her name was Mary Morton and she was eighteen years old at the time, eight years younger than Morrison. He met her in Macao, where he was living in the house John Roberts had provided for him. Her father was an Irish surgeon in the Royal Navy who had brought his family with him to live in Ceylon for seven years, and they were stopping at Macao on their way back home. Morrison wooed her nervously over the course of a few months. As he dined with her family and led them in prayer, he was hobbled by guilt that he should be working on his Chinese instead. His courtship succeeded, however, and on the afternoon of February 20, 1809, just as her family were preparing to depart from Macao and return home, Mary Morton and Robert Morrison were married. For once, he was happy.23
Driven as he was by his devotion to God, Morrison’s study of Chinese was grueling and single-minded. Mary joined him initially, but she could not keep up. When conditions permitted, he studied with his tutors for eight or more hours a day, every day of the week except for the Sabbath (when he would read the Jesuit Gospel translation from the British Museum, which he had copied to bring with him to China). It did not take long before he reached his mentor George Staunton’s level of ability in the written language and left his counterpart Thomas Manning behind.24 He also surpassed both of them in his speaking ability, for while Staunton and Manning aimed only to learn Mandarin, for the sake of communicating with imperial officials, Morrison hoped to convert ordinary people. Thus he learned to speak the local dialect of Cantonese as well.
Morrison’s teachers were a ramshackle crew. Abel Yun, the teacher Staunton had set him up with in Macao, was a Roman Catholic from north China who spoke Mandarin but, since he had been educated by Catholic missionaries, could write only Latin and was illiterate in Chinese characters. Another teacher of sorts was Morrison’s servant boy, who taught him to speak Cantonese, though Morrison regretted that the boy came from the countryside and spoke with such a thick accent that people from the city said they couldn�
��t understand him. His most esteemed teacher, an elderly scholar he called Mr. Li, had spent twelve years in Portugal training with the Jesuits to become a priest before quitting to get married. After leaving the Jesuits he returned to Canton and became a merchant, but found little success. He was fluent in written Chinese but had no future as a scholar, and by the time he agreed to be Morrison’s teacher he was seventy years old and nearly bankrupt.25
Morrison’s goal of translating the entire Bible was a mammoth project that he expected would take much of his lifetime, if he should complete it at all—King James, after all, had employed fifty-four translators working simultaneously, whereas Morrison toiled mostly alone. But he had a subsidiary goal that would turn out to be much more important for the other English speakers around him in Canton: namely, to try to make it easier for those who came after him to learn Chinese. Within a year of his arrival in Canton, he had already prepared a basic vocabulary of Cantonese, which he sent back to London so future missionaries could study it in advance. His larger aspiration in that field, however, was to prepare a Chinese-English dictionary—one that could be as comprehensive as possible, that could be used to decipher any kind of text that might exist in China. Nothing like it had ever existed.
It was on account of Robert Morrison’s language work that the East India Company finally took notice of him. In spite of the overt hostility of the London directors to his presence in Canton, to say nothing of his own pious disdain for the men of commerce, the select committee needed an interpreter while Staunton was away. Morrison, for his part, quite desperately needed a source of income, especially if he was to support a family. And so in February 1809, on the very day of Morrison’s wedding in Macao, John Roberts (the orders for whose removal were still making their way from England) offered him a position as the Company’s Chinese interpreter with a salary of £500 per year—the same as George Staunton’s salary at the time and equal to all of the money Morrison had spent in his first year in China. Even more valuable than the salary, the job also came with an invitation to live in the British factory in Canton.26
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