Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  Relations with his munshi, on the other hand, weren’t so good. Manning took to calling Zhao “his sublime crossness” for his tendency to explode with anger. It came to the point, he wrote, that they spoke to each other as little as possible “in order that no quarrel might ensue.”50 At one point, Zhao broke down and asked why Manning had even brought him along. He said Manning should just have left him in India. Their frictions were at least partly due to the munshi’s personality—he considered the Tibetans uncivilized, and didn’t think too highly of Manning’s culture either—but as a Qing subject, he was in genuine danger if he should be discovered as a Catholic, to say nothing of being a lowly man from Canton who had traveled to India and Tibet without permission and escorted a European secretly over the border. He had good reasons for being testy.

  The General and his soldiers said goodbye at Gyangze, a town about a hundred miles from Pagri where the road to Lhasa turned northeast. Manning and his munshi continued toward the capital with just a guide, who soon abandoned them. Onward they rode on broken horses through barren valleys below high, snowbound mountains, along rivers of icewater and up steepening roads marked by piles of white stones. In early December, their faces blistered by the high-altitude sun, they descended into a plain and finally saw the Tibetan capital of Lhasa sparkling in the distance.

  Manning was the first Englishman ever to lay eyes on the city (and the last for the remainder of the nineteenth century). His only European predecessors were a pair of Catholic missionaries who had reached the city two hundred years earlier. From a distance, at least, it was the Shangri-La of fables. The grand Potala Palace where the Dalai Lama lived loomed high and white on a hill above the city, visible from miles off, more magnificent in appearance than he had even imagined it could be. But some of the magic was lost on approach. A ceremonial gate they passed through on the road to the city had gilt decorations that caught the sun from afar, but up close the ornaments seemed imbalanced and off-kilter to Manning, reminding him of “pastry work” or “gingerbread architecture.” The blindingly white palace itself was like a hive, swarming with monks in gorgeous robes of deep maroon, but the city below it was poor and rough. The houses were “begrimed with smut and dirt.” Wild dogs with mangy and ulcerated skin ran freely in the streets, growling and digging about for food. In spite of himself, Manning sensed a deep strangeness to the place, an unreality. “Even the mirth and laughter of the inhabitants I thought dreamy and ghostly,” he recalled. “The dreaminess no doubt was in my mind, but I never could get rid of the idea.”51

  On the advice of his munshi, Manning pretended to be a Buddhist lama from India, one who happened to be versed in medicine. He hid the fact that he could speak or read Chinese, since it would make the presence of an interpreter suspicious. He also hid that he could speak English, so the two of them only communicated openly in Latin (in which both were fluent, it being the confluence of Manning’s Cambridge education and the munshi’s childhood training by a Roman Catholic missionary). This led to a long chain of interpretation when Manning spoke to Tibetans: someone would first have to translate from Tibetan into Chinese, then Manning’s munshi would translate the Chinese into Latin for him, and he would have to respond in Latin, back along the chain. To avoid standing out—and because he decided he liked it—he performed the kowtow before Chinese and Manchu officials whenever he was asked (a lesser version than that reserved for the emperor, touching the head to the ground three times rather than nine). In fact, he said, he found it so restful to kneel down to the ground after all the walking he had to do that he tried to kowtow as much as possible—including in front of high-ranking Tibetans (which offended his munshi, who said no Chinese would ever do that).52

  Manning was granted an audience with the Dalai Lama on December 17, 1811. To get to it, he had to climb up hundreds of steps carved into the side of the mountain on which the Potala Palace was built, steps that gave way in time to ladders on which he continued climbing up through the nine floors of the palace, its air rich with the smoke of incense and yak-butter lamps, to reach the high roof with its breathtaking view over the city and the broad, vast plain to the deep blue-white mountains in the distance.53 A monk escorted him into a smooth-floored reception hall built onto the roof, walls hung with tapestries and its ceiling held up by high, strong pillars. Sunshine streamed down through a skylight. In the middle of the hall, on a throne supported by carved lions, he found a young boy in maroon robes and a pointed saffron hood who appeared to be about seven years old (he had, in fact, just turned six). Manning knelt down before the Dalai Lama and performed the kowtow.

  Manning still had his beard, but he had shaved the top of his head in preparation for the audience, so that the boy could lay hands on him. The normally impish Englishman was quieted in the lama’s presence. “His face was, I thought, poetically and effectingly beautiful,” wrote Manning. “He was of a gay and cheerful disposition; his beautiful mouth perpetually unbending into a graceful smile, which illuminated his whole countenance. Sometimes, particularly when he had looked at me, his smile almost approached to a gentle laugh.” They made polite small talk. The Dalai Lama asked about his journey. Manning asked for Tibetan Buddhist books, and asked if someone who spoke Chinese could teach him their contents, though he was gently rebuffed. It wasn’t the conversation that mattered, though, but simply the fact of being in the Dalai Lama’s presence. Unlike Macartney’s audience with Qianlong, there was no power relationship in play, no hidden challenge, no posturing. Just curiosity. And friendliness. All of Manning’s playful cynicism vanished. “I could have wept through strangeness of sensation,” he wrote afterward. “I was absorbed in reflections when I got home.”54

  . . .

  Manning’s experience with the imperial government at Lhasa, by contrast, came as a lurching shock. The senior Qing official in the Tibetan capital, known by the Manchu title of “amban,” was the closest thing there was to an imperial governor-general in the region. Tibet was a protectorate, meaning that it enjoyed a certain measure of internal autonomy, while China controlled it militarily. The Dalai Lama was Tibet’s political and religious leader, but most major decisions had to be filtered through and approved by the Manchu amban, who also exercised full control over Tibet’s foreign relations. It was thus the amban’s office that took a more sinister notice of Manning’s arrival and began sending agents to investigate him and the munshi. Visitors claiming to be friends came to visit their rented rooms at all hours. They made awkward conversation, long outstayed their welcomes, and opened doors to poke around where they weren’t invited.

  At one point, the amban called Manning in for a face-to-face interrogation. It was a relatively civil interview, but he came straight out and told Manning that he thought he was either a Catholic missionary or a spy. He just wasn’t sure which. As for the latter possibility, he revealed that he was not only aware of but worried about Britain’s conquest of territory in India and its implications for Tibet. “These Europeans are very formidable,” he told Manning—unsure of where exactly he fit in, trying to draw him out. “Now one man has come to spy the country he will inform others. Numbers will come, and at last they will be for taking the country from us.”55

  This particular amban, Manning was mortified to learn, harbored a special loathing for the British. The only reason he was stationed in Tibet was because the Jiaqing emperor had removed him from his previous position, a vastly preferable one in Canton, after Admiral Drury’s invasion of Macao in 1808. He was one of the officials the emperor had punished for being too soft on foreigners. So he considered the British to be the architects of his professional downfall: in his mind, they were the sole reason why he was stuck in this remote, semibarbaric Himalayan wasteland instead of enjoying the luxuries and riches of Canton.

  Manning worried about being recognized as English (rather than just a British subject from India, as he was pretending). He wore Chinese glasses as a disguise. And he took pains to hide the fact that he had ever bee
n to Canton, let alone that he had worked for the East India Company’s factory there—which might trigger God knew what kind of reaction from the vindictive amban. Even if the amban himself didn’t recognize Manning, one of the secretaries he had brought from Canton might. Or they could simply have known there was an Englishman with a long beard who could speak Chinese. Manning knew the Qing officials were concerned about him; there were rumors that he and the munshi were to be tortured. A comet with a brilliant tail had appeared during the season before his arrival, lingering brightly on the horizon for months. The amban took it as an omen that something bad was coming to Lhasa. He told Manning he thought it might be him.56

  After several days of interviews, the amban sent a report to the emperor in which he informed Jiaqing of his suspicion that Manning, who appeared to be a European, might actually be a Catholic missionary who had come to Tibet pretending to be a Buddhist but was really intending to spread Christianity in secret.57 Though Manning and the munshi weren’t privy to the amban’s report, they heard rumors about its contents and the munshi was terrified. He worried that he might be executed. He thought Manning might be too.

  Beijing was more than fifteen hundred miles away as the crow flew, so it would be months before the amban could hear back from the emperor and learn how Jiaqing wished for him to deal with the two suspicious travelers. So Manning and his munshi were effectively made prisoners, forced to winter over in Lhasa while waiting to learn what would happen to them. The munshi decorated his small room for the long term—little ribbons, a looking glass, a carved seal. Manning saw patients, and met several more times with the Dalai Lama. His money ran low, so he had to start selling his possessions—some cloth, a belt, handkerchiefs, a few bottles of cherry brandy he had brought along for gifts, an opera glass. Relations continued to sour with the munshi, who lost all patience with the neediness of his European charge; Manning, in turn, resented the munshi’s “beastly, mulish behavior.” It seemed all but certain that they would not be allowed to continue on freely into China proper. Mostly, though, Manning just hoped he would not be put to death. He tried not to envision the scene, but his mind kept getting pulled toward it. “I look round,” he imagined, “I have no resource, no refuge; instruments of torture, instruments of execution are brought by florid, high-cheeked, busy, grinning, dull-hearted men . . .”58

  Jiaqing’s response finally arrived in late February 1812, just after the lunar new year. He agreed that it was reasonable to assume Manning was a Catholic missionary. “Recently, the western foreigners have spread out to every place, preaching their heretical Catholic teachings with the intention of stirring up trouble,” he wrote; “they most certainly do not know their place. You should devote your attention to taking precautions against them.” His primary concern was with Manning. “This foreigner Manning claims to be from the Calcutta tribe,” he wrote. “But the territory of Calcutta is on the coast, and is connected by sea lanes to the West, where people are not Buddhist. So why would he come all this way to Tibet? Clearly he is just pretending to be a follower of Buddha and has come secretly as some kind of spy, trying to find a crack in the wall, intending to spread his teachings and delude the masses. You absolutely cannot allow him to stay in Tibet.”59

  Jiaqing ordered Manning to be deported, and further demanded that border security be stepped up in response to his incursion, to make sure no more westerners could get into Tibet from India. In the future, he said, any Europeans who came to the border pretending to be Buddhist pilgrims should be turned back. All things considered, deportation was a gentle punishment, but it was standard for foreigners who had not committed capital crimes. As for Manning’s munshi, however—or, as Jiaqing called him ominously in the edict, “the Chinese traitor”—he was no foreigner. Jiaqing had him arrested in preparation for a trial. Manning last saw his munshi on the day after the emperor’s edict arrived. He was in chains. There is no record of what they talked about. After their months of bickering travel together, they were never to see each other again.60

  The journey to Lhasa marked both the culmination and the end of Thomas Manning’s career as an explorer. He would never dare to repeat the attempt. But he had at least shown that China could, with the right preparation and at great risk, be entered. And he survived the journey, escorted back to the border at Pagri with an iron collar around his neck and finally released into Bhutan to make his way back to India.

  In the bigger picture of Britain’s embryonic ability to understand China, the basic impression Manning brought back from his journey into Tibet was a tantalizing one. It was an impression founded on the stark contrast between the warmth of Manning’s reception by low-level officials, the General, the soldiers, and the Dalai Lama on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the harsh suspicion of the amban and the emperor above him. Beyond demonstrating that China’s borders were porous, Manning brought back evidence that many of the Chinese and Tibetan subjects of the empire were in fact quite friendly and open to outsiders. They did not appear to be even remotely as antiforeign as the British had imagined—in fact, they seemed positively eager for trade and other kinds of commerce with westerners. The closed nature of China, Manning would testify a few years later before a parliamentary committee seeking to expand British trade, was due entirely to the jealousy of the reigning government. It had nothing to do with the people themselves.61 Find some way to get past the emperor and the jealous mandarins, his experience suggested, and the ordinary people of China would welcome the British with open arms.

  Back at Canton, meanwhile, Robert Morrison was struggling to balance the work of creating his dictionary with caring for his wife. After the death of their newborn son in 1810, a local doctor had pronounced her incurable, but her emotional condition stabilized and in 1812 they had another child—a girl, Rebecca, who survived. Mary seemed happier after her daughter’s birth, less alone.62 A son, John Robert, followed in April 1814, and the family grew, but mostly in Morrison’s absence. As before, he was forced to be away from them during the long trading season, which also meant that while he was in Canton he could devote every ounce of his energies to his language projects. His work on the Chinese-English dictionary, in particular, escalated as the years passed until it consumed nearly all of his waking hours, all of his guilt channeling itself into the manuscript on which he worked sometimes eleven or twelve hours a day for months on end, broken only by the weekly Sabbath. Mary’s mental health declined again, and in January 1815, at the instigation of a British doctor, she finally took the children and went home to England. Morrison was left to work year-round without disturbance, but also without companionship.63

  One of the practical difficulties of the dictionary that so consumed Morrison was how to publish it when it was done. The Gospel pamphlets he had worked on were written entirely in Chinese and meant only for Chinese readers, so they were best printed after the local fashion with traditional carved woodblocks in string-bound volumes. However, the dictionary’s users would, hopefully, be English speakers from Britain and America, and the dense English printing it called for would be unfeasible with Chinese woodblocks. It needed a proper English press, but there was no such thing in China. As it turned out, though, the members of the select committee were so excited about the prospect of his dictionary and the subtle power they expected it would bring to the British in China that in 1814, as the manuscript for its first volume neared completion, they expended the lavish funds to import one for him from England.

  When the president of the select committee at the time, a man named Elphinstone, asked the Court of Directors in London to send a printing press to China, he underscored how important Morrison’s dictionary would be for the “English cause in China,” as he termed it. The dictionary would make it possible for the British in Canton to communicate directly with officials and any number of local elites, he argued, and thus “gradually remove the ridiculous prejudices at present entertained against foreigners.” It would ensure that the British “will be thought des
erving of more respect and attention, as our character becomes better known.”64 In other words, the essential value of Morrison’s Chinese-English dictionary, by his reasoning, would be to allow the British to make themselves better understood to the Chinese—not to make the Chinese better understood to them. But that was perhaps the best way to sell it, for the directors in London had no particular interest in learning more about China; what they wanted was to improve trade, and Elphinstone’s vision promised just that. They approved.

  The press, along with an English printer by the name of P. P. Thoms to operate it, arrived in Macao on a Company ship in 1814. Thoms brought with him a full set of English type and tens of thousands of blank metal shanks so he could get Chinese type cut by hand in Macao. The directors did not bother providing him with paper, since they knew that the Chinese made that commodity best. The only conditions the directors put on the printing press were, first, that it should stay in Macao rather than Canton (where it might rile the authorities or be confiscated), and second, that it should never be used to print religious works.65 The first volume of the dictionary came out the following year in Macao in a beautiful quarto edition. In a sign of how far Morrison’s relationship with the Company had come since it first refused to let him sail on its ships to Canton, he dedicated his dictionary to the Court of Directors of the East India Company, “by their much obliged, and very obedient humble servant, the author.”66