A glance at the volume shows much of what Morrison had been up against. For one thing, at nearly a thousand oversize pages it was still only the first of nine planned installments, a fragment of the eventual whole. Chinese was a vast language. Morrison worked with the most complete Chinese dictionary in existence, the Kangxi Dictionary of 1716, compiled under Qianlong’s grandfather, which contained forty thousand different characters (in contrast to the mere twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet). No scholar in China would know them all—many of the characters in the Kangxi Dictionary were obscure, or variant forms of a similar character—but all had to be accounted for, arranged, and defined.
Furthermore, while each character was the rough semantic equivalent of a word in English, many could have multiple meanings or be used as part of a compound, and those variant meanings and compounds had to be defined as well. Then there were the allusions, for much of classical Chinese was incomprehensible without understanding the literary references—to the Confucian classics, to ancient historical texts, to poetry—that a highly educated Chinese reader would bring to the text. In other words, to make an effective dictionary Morrison not only had to account for tens of thousands of characters and the compounds in which they were commonly used, but he also had to provide a window into the deeper cultural context that gave them meaning. The work he attempted to create would therefore not be some mere handbook for deciphering official regulations or imperial edicts—it would, he hoped, be the key to an entire civilization.
Some of the characters could be defined easily in just a word or two (basic nouns, for instance). Others, however, depending on how culturally distant they were from similar concepts in English, could be far more complicated to explain. So, to give one example, the entry in Morrison’s dictionary for the Chinese character meaning “to study” went on for a full thirty-nine pages of explanation. That was because to understand what the Chinese meant by “study,” Morrison felt, one had to appreciate China’s long tradition of Confucian scholarship and the centrality of education to its society and government. And so, along with giving a range of historical quotations to illuminate the character’s basic meaning, Morrison went on to sketch out the general contours of Chinese education. He translated major points from the government regulations for the civil service examinations—descriptions of the content of the exams, how they were conducted, who could qualify to take them, how they were graded.
As part of his definition for the character, he also translated a list of one hundred rules from a Chinese academy, to give a sense of the Chinese reverence for learning. Among those rules: That students should bow first to Confucius upon entering the classroom, then to the teacher. That they should sit in order of seniority. That at the end of the day the youngest should be allowed to leave first and they must go directly home (where they must bow first to the household gods, then to their ancestors, then to their parents). Students were not to form groups or make plans to play together. They were to read out loud, but only in low voices. Students were not to speak the gutter language of the marketplace. When sitting, students were to be still, without crossing their legs or leaning to one side. When outside, they were not to frisk about or throw things. Students were to love their books and keep them from harm. They were to apply the teacher’s lessons to their own conduct every day. On and on went the list, filling page after expensively printed page—all of it necessary, in Morrison’s opinion, for the reader of his dictionary to grasp the essence of what “study” really meant in China.67
A call for subscriptions to the current and future volumes of Morrison’s dictionary ran in some of the top literary magazines in London, announcing that although the full run would likely cost up to 20 guineas (about $2,000 today), it was worth the price not just because of the enormously long history that lay behind the Chinese language, but—and this was the most important point—because Chinese was a living language. It was not some dusty artifact like Latin or Sanskrit. It may have been classical, and ancient, but it was hardly obsolete—after nearly four thousand years it was still, the advertisement explained, “the written medium, in private and public life, in literature, in arts, and in government, of the most extensive empire on earth.”68 The Asiatic Journal, in British India, commended Morrison for making possible “the acquisition of the Chinese language, a task which the greater part will consider . . . positively unconquerable and terrific.”69 The Quarterly Review in London, which had given such an adulatory review to George Staunton’s translation of the Qing legal code, recognized that Morrison’s work was of an entirely different scale—his dictionary, they declared, would be nothing less than “the most important work in Chinese literature that has yet reached Europe.” Hopefully, they added that “we most sincerely wish he may live to finish it.”70
CHAPTER 6
Hidden Shoals
George Staunton finally got his embassy in 1816. Or at least he got an embassy—which, though he would not lead it (an honor that fell to one William, Lord Amherst), would nevertheless finally give him the chance to return to Beijing and complete the unfinished business of his father. By the time the new mission was announced to him in January 1816, Staunton had been back in Canton since 1810 and had finally completed his climb through the ranks of the factory. Through sheer doggedness and a few opportune retirements, he had attained the presidency of the select committee. He was the leader of the factory, the taipan, the preeminent British subject in Canton. It was a long way from his early days as a junior writer, far more prestigious and powerful (to say nothing of the roughly £20,000 it brought in each year, about two hundred times his starting salary). Despite having gained the respect of those below him in the factory, however, he never did become fully comfortable in their free-mannered bachelor community. He had tried at times to fit in—back in 1806, for a few months, he engaged in what he demurely referred to as “rather high play” with the others—but eventually his priggishness won out. He would have no remorse about leaving Canton when the time came, and by 1816 that time seemed to have come at last: he had made the fortune he had come for, and a prominent role in a British embassy to Jiaqing’s court would surely cement his reputation in England. A permanent return—and perhaps even a seat in Parliament—were within his grasp.1
The proximate reason for the embassy was a sudden and sharp downturn in British-Chinese relations at Canton during 1813 and 1814, in which things got so bad that the British government saw “reason to apprehend the failure of the Commerce altogether.”2 Some of the frictions were purely local—the East India Company, for some reason, tried to give John Roberts a second chance in Canton, and the local Chinese officials protested. Separately, the emperor reduced the number of Hong merchants the British could trade with, and the supercargoes protested. The larger source of trouble, however, had a more distant cause: the outbreak of the War of 1812, which brought a bloom of violence between British and American ships to the waters around Canton. Whereas the Napoleonic Wars had mostly kept their distance due to the scarcity of French trade in south China, the Americans were second only to the British in the size of their commerce at Canton, so there was no way this time for the two enemies’ ships to avoid each other.
Given the lack of U.S. Navy cruisers to convoy their merchant vessels after the war broke out, the Americans in south China relied on letters of marque and heavy armament, turning their merchant vessels into privateers. They also tried to avoid landing at the same time as the Company ships with their naval escorts, but the timing did not always work. In March 1814, the Royal Navy frigate Doris captured a three-hundred-ton American privateer, the Hunter, and brought her into Macao as a prize. Two months later, the Doris and three of its boats chased the American schooner Russell all the way up the Pearl River to the Whampoa anchorage, just a few miles shy of the city itself. They then exchanged fire at Whampoa with another American ship, the Sphynx, which they successfully boarded and captured. Tit-for-tat raids continued over the following months, with Americans captu
ring lightly armed British “country” ships sailing in from India and the British sometimes capturing them back—all above the angry, ongoing complaints of the Chinese authorities, which the westerners ignored. Finally, the Qing governor-general ordered supplies cut off to the Doris and threatened to suspend trade with the British and Americans until the two sides could behave themselves.3
The British supercargoes in Canton complained that, as always, they had no control over the actions of the Royal Navy—and, as always, those complaints met with disbelief on the Chinese side. Hostilities with the local authorities escalated quickly. A Chinese linguist working in the British factory was arrested and likely subjected to torture. The governor-general started refusing to read communications in Chinese from the supercargoes, a privilege to which they had become accustomed since Staunton’s early days. Seeking leverage, and feeling themselves to be the wronged party, the British tested the value of their commerce to the Chinese government by taking the unprecedented move of shutting down their own trade and withdrawing their ships from Canton until they should be treated better.
There had been tensions before at Canton of a similar scale that had not resulted in the extravagantly costly measure of sending a royal embassy to Beijing to patch up relations. But while the problems in 1814 may have been more severe than usual, the crucial difference in this case was that by the time the East India Company began asking the government for an embassy, the Napoleonic Wars were ending. Amherst’s departure for China came just six months after the Duke of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo in June 1815, in which the twenty-two years of nearly continuous warfare between Britain and France finally came to an end. The East India Company could start planning for the world after the peace, and independently of anything happening at Canton, the directors wanted to make sure that France didn’t send a postwar embassy to China before Britain did.
The two British missions would thus be bookends around the long era of war with France: as Macartney had departed for China during the last days of peace before its onset, the new mission, under Amherst, would come to announce its end. Amherst was instructed to tell the Chinese court that the prince regent (for George III had gone mad by this time and, unlike his counterpart Qianlong in his own dotage, no longer exercised power over the government) was “sensible how much the happiness of Nations depended on the cultivation of the habits of peace” and that “the pacification of Europe had appeared to him to present a most auspicious occasion” to send this embassy to China.4 One of the underlying imperatives of Amherst’s mission was to make sure the Chinese understood that Great Britain was now unrivaled as the dominant military power in Europe.
William Pitt Amherst was an odd choice to lead the embassy. A dull but well-mannered man who was untalented at public speaking, he was neither brilliant nor particularly handsome, but he hailed from an excellent family. He was the son of an aide-de-camp to the king, after whose death (when William was eight) he was raised by his uncle, Jeffrey Amherst, the famous commander in chief of the British army. The sum total of his diplomatic experience when he departed for China had been an ineffective ambassadorship to Sicily from 1809 to 1811, in which he tried but failed to bring rival factions of nationalists and the exiled monarchy of the Two Sicilies together. He played no public role after leaving that position in 1811, until he was unexpectedly called up to lead the embassy to China in 1816.5
The Amherst mission was explicitly conceived as an end run around the local authorities at Canton. The directors in London assumed (wrongly) that the troubles in Canton were a purely local matter and the Jiaqing emperor knew nothing about them. Their goal was to inform the emperor of what they saw as the outrageous behavior of his officials at the southern trading port, assuming (again, wrongly) that he would then discipline those officials and perhaps apologize for the treatment the British had suffered. Thus Amherst was instructed to avoid touching at Canton on his way to Beijing, since it was so likely that the hoppo and the governor-general would try to prevent the British from going over their heads. Even Staunton and the other factory personnel who joined the mission were to sail separately and rendezvous in secret with Amherst’s ship, the forty-six-gun frigate Alceste, at some distance from Canton.
By the time the news of the coming embassy reached Canton in January 1816, however, Staunton was no longer sure that the timing was appropriate. The overt reason for sending Amherst to China—to defuse the tensions over British attacks on American shipping near Canton—was already moot. The War of 1812 had ended, and British warships were no longer lying in wait for American trading vessels. (Not that their rivalry would cease; one leading American merchant, writing to his Canton agent from Boston to report the end of the war, predicted continued harassment at the hands of the British: “How far we shall, in time of peace, be permitted to pursue our former commerce, is a question difficult to decide,” he wrote. “Great Britain has neither affection nor respect for us.”)6
Staunton had managed to patch up relations with the local authorities through a round of tense but successful negotiations with a representative of the governor-general. Trade had been reopened—for, absent the interference of external forces, the trade at Canton tended to rebalance itself quite naturally, thanks to the shared interest of all concerned in seeing it prosper—and so by the time Staunton learned of Amherst’s embassy, he worried that “much of what was of probable accomplishment, was already accomplished.”7 As always he had his dream of filling the shoes of his father, but he doubted whether there was anything the British might gain from sending an ambassador to Beijing to inform Jiaqing of their troubles in Canton. He feared instead that it might be a question of what they could lose.
The emperor, as it happened, was hardly oblivious to what was going on in Canton. In fact, Jiaqing not only knew about the tensions between the British and the local officials, but he also knew about George Staunton personally and had begun to wonder if he might be dangerous. In January 1815, the emperor had asked for an investigation into whether Staunton had anything to do with the Doris chasing the American schooner up to Whampoa. “There is an English foreigner named Staunton (si-dang-dong),” Jiaqing wrote, “who once came to the capital along with his country’s tribute mission. He was youthful and cunning then, and on the way home he made careful maps of the terrain of our mountains and rivers. After getting to Canton he did not return to his home country, but instead stayed on in Macao. He has been there for twenty years now and is thoroughly proficient in Chinese. By regulation, foreigners who live in Macao cannot enter the provincial capital of Canton, but Staunton has now been there for so long that when new foreigners come, most of them look to him for guidance. I fear that before long he will cause trouble.”8 In light of that edict, some of the Hong merchants warned their friends in the British factory that Staunton should not accompany Amherst’s mission to Beijing—the emperor obviously did not want him coming to the capital again. Staunton, however, ignored them.9
Staunton had reconciled himself to the fact that the Company did not want the ambassador to be one of its own employees, but he still found himself bitter over the situation of rank within the mission: he complained to his mother that “my stature in it was not what it ought to be.”10 His position in Amherst’s embassy would be intricately tied up with the memory of his father, and all of his language study had been tending toward the goal of returning to the Qing court in Beijing. By 1816, independently of his work with the Company, he rightly considered himself his country’s leading expert on China. So he was profoundly offended when he found out that, including Amherst, there would be three commissioners in the embassy—and that he himself was likely to be ranked third, behind Amherst’s secretary.
So it was that when Amherst arrived on the Alceste at their secret rendezvous off the sparsely populated island of Hong Kong in July 1816—far from the prying eyes of Canton—Staunton was so petulant about his rank that he initially refused even to speak to the ambassador. He would only communicate with him th
rough his secretary. But Amherst very much wanted Staunton’s expertise—not just in language, but also his familiarity with the government after such a long residence in Canton. Amherst himself, of course, had no experience with China at all. So he and his secretary cajoled Staunton, soothing his injured pride. The result of their negotiations was that Amherst elevated Staunton to the second rank in the embassy, ahead of his secretary.11 That was the best Staunton could rightly hope for, and so—after insisting somewhat pedantically that Lord Amherst put the promotion into writing—he agreed to come along. He wrote immediately to his mother to share the good news: “You will perceive,” he told her proudly, “that I am established the Second, and eventually on the death or absence of Lord Amherst First of the Embassy.” Not that he was hoping for Amherst to die quickly (though perhaps he was), but even if Staunton didn’t make the top rank he was still, he bragged to his mother in an Oedipal moment, outdoing his father. “Lord A[mherst],” he told her, “also said verbally, ‘you are in a higher situation than your father was because you are actually found in the Commission of Embassy—whereas he was only Sec[retar]y of Legation and eventual successor.’”12 It was a fine distinction, but it would do.
Once satisfied that he should take part, Staunton brought everything he could to bear on the mission. He convinced Robert Morrison to come along as the lead Chinese interpreter, assisted by three of his language students from the factory (two of whom were junior writers and the other a physician). Thomas Manning, who had been living in India since his expulsion from Tibet, returned to Canton in May 1816 in hopes of joining up as well. Though Manning would eventually gain renown back in England as an explorer and scholar of China—his bust graces the library of the Royal Asiatic Society in London to this day—it was a vague sort of fame in his own time due to his indisposition to publish anything. Nevertheless, he wrapped himself in a mystique that drew others to him, and Staunton felt that his services would be crucial to the embassy.
Imperial Twilight Page 19