By the time Manning got back to Canton, his mission (like Staunton’s) had been accomplished as well as he could have hoped. The journey to Lhasa, while a triumph in its own right, nevertheless showed how difficult it would be to travel unseen through the rest of China, and the terror of his arrest left him unwilling to make another attempt. He was ready to return to England, just waiting for a good opportunity. Charles Lamb had been imploring him to come home, teasing him that after so many years abroad in the wilds of Asia he would be completely out of fashion in their London circle (“your jokes obsolete, your puns rejected with fastidiousness as wit of the last age”). In a touching letter on Christmas Day 1815, Lamb expressed his sorrow for Manning’s long absence and the passage of time. “Come out of Babylon, oh my friend!” he wrote. “You must not expect to see the same England again which you left. Empires have been overturned, crowns trodden into dust, the face of the western world quite changed; your friends have all got old.”13
As it did for Staunton, the Amherst mission thus offered Manning a timely capstone for his career in China—a journey to Beijing, no less—with the added boon that the Alceste could provide his passage home to England at the end. The only problem was that Lord Amherst refused to let him come along. Given his recent deportation from Tibet, Amherst worried that Manning’s presence in the embassy might anger the emperor in Beijing. (In fact it wouldn’t, but only because the Manchu amban in Lhasa, and the handlers of the Amherst mission, rendered Manning’s English name into Chinese using different characters, so in the Chinese documents there was no way to link the explorer of Tibet to the interpreter for the British embassy.)14
The bigger issue, though, was Manning’s beard. Amherst, with his gentlemanly sensibilities, was offended by Manning’s free-spirited appearance. Staunton put up a fight on Manning’s behalf. He told Amherst he regretted that “Mr. Manning’s particular views did not permit him to conform entirely to the English costume,” but assured him that the extensive beard reflected only Manning’s “natural indolence” (as one of the writers described it) rather than any failure of character.15 Manning, for his part, agreed to put aside his bright silk robes for the time being and dress like a proper Englishman, though he still refused to shave off his beard. Amherst finally gave in.
A deeper sense of entitlement surrounded the British mission to China in 1816 than the one under Macartney in 1793. The shift went along, to a large degree, with the post-Napoleonic surge of British national pride, the confidence of being the preeminent military and commercial power on earth. Some back home wondered why China did not seem to recognize this. A writer in the British Review expressed indignation that in China “even the East India Company, the most powerful mercantile association in the world, have no privileges to encourage, and no rights to protect them, more than the lowest adventurer from Portugal or America.” In light of Britain’s great strength, the unwillingness of China to grant special trading privileges made the country’s leaders seem obtuse. “With the characteristic pride of semi-barbarians,” the writer noted sarcastically, “the government of China professes to take no notice of such an insignificant affair as foreign commerce.”16
Along with the general rise in British pride, though, there was something more subtle at work. The king’s emissaries this time would not be, as Macartney and his suite had been, the first of their countrymen to visit China’s capital—and so from the standpoint of exploration, a bit of the shine had come off. Henry Ellis, Amherst’s secretary and the third-ranking member of the mission (after he was shunted down the ladder by Staunton), was especially unenthused. In his journal, which he described as “intended for the eye of private friendship,” though he later published it, he apologized to his friends at the outset that he would likely have little of interest to tell them. Since Staunton’s father and others on the Macartney mission had already written books about the country, he thought there was probably nothing left to tell.17
Ellis was the illegitimate son of the powerful president of the Board of Control—the cabinet minister who supervised the East India Company and thus British India—and he was jaded beyond his twenty-eight years from having spent more than a decade as a Company and government operative, sometimes secret, in India and Persia. His cynicism was born of the seeping imperialist view that the civilizations of the Far East were lost to history, begging for renovation by the British with their historic engines of progress and commerce. Once acquired, it was a difficult worldview to shake, and his conclusions after his voyage to China would be every bit as wearied as his mood going into it; which is to say, he would find exactly what he was looking for. “[My] curiosity was soon satiated and destroyed by the moral, political, and even local uniformity,” he would write at the end of the journey. “Were it not therefore for the trifling gratification arising from being one of the few Europeans who have visited the interior of China, I should consider the time that has elapsed as wholly without return.” After the long months of travel to and from the country, and the extensive labor of preparing his journal for publication, Ellis’s summary pronouncement at the end of his five-hundred-page account was simply that China was a “peculiar but uninteresting nation.”18
The British travelers this time had lower expectations than their predecessors. They came on a mission of friendship but were quicker to find fault, to take insult, to dismiss. They encountered the same landscapes, the same people (at least the children and grandchildren thereof) that Macartney had found so stirring in 1793 when he wanted to shout lines from Shakespeare across the water, but the intervening years had taken their toll on the scenes’ romance. “The appearance of the country was miserable,” wrote Robert Morrison at the site of one of Macartney’s reveries; “nothing but low mud huts were seen on the banks of the river. Crowds of people were every where collected to gaze on us as we passed; they were all of a more dark and swarthy complexion than a stranger, who considered the latitude in which they lived, would have expected to find them.”19 Where Macartney had seen a brave new world, Morrison saw a country of dark heathens.
The members of Amherst’s embassy were also bolder about asserting themselves. The presence of Staunton, Morrison, and Manning as interpreters meant that they could push the arguments they wished to make in the terms by which they understood them; they were not beholden to Chinese go-betweens. They probed beyond the boundaries their hosts had laid out for them, leading one critic back in England to complain that they “frequently ran riot, and rambled to considerable distances from the line of their route.”20 They also knew firsthand the weaknesses of the dynasty’s military after watching the Qing navy flounder in its campaign to suppress piracy near Canton; the military gulf between Britain and China had never seemed so vast. They were also aware by this time of the terrible White Lotus rebellion that had shaken Jiaqing’s early rule and how its suppression had nearly bankrupted the government. In a dispatch home, Amherst reported on how far the Qing dynasty seemed to have declined since Macartney’s visit. In contrast to the “real power and authority” of Qianlong, Amherst wrote, the reign of his son Jiaqing was “frequently and very lately disturbed by insurrections of his subjects.” Amherst noted as well the “disordered state of the Imperial Finances.”21 Overall, the members of the embassy in 1816 did not, as Macartney had, come as open-eyed admirers.
One result of this newly emboldened British attitude was a more aggressive charting of the coastline by Amherst’s ships. Where the Lion and Hindostan had been largely content to wait for Macartney at the island of Chusan, Amherst’s ships—accompanied by two East India Company surveying vessels, the aptly named Discovery and Investigator—divided forces and went to work immediately after dropping off the embassy and its baggage at the White River. On August 11, while the other vessels went south, the Alceste and Discovery took a northern route, sailing up past the point where the Great Wall meets the sea and along the coast of Manchuria to make a partial circuit of the Yellow Sea, surveying the topography as they went. They sail
ed around the Liaodong Peninsula and then farther along up the Manchurian coast to the mouth of the Yalu River, where they passed beyond the frontier of the Qing Empire and entered Korean waters.
The Alceste and Discovery anchored at several villages and towns along the way so their officers could go on shore. Those officers took notes on population, on climate and geology, on the quality of the soil. They noted military installations (and the lack thereof), and sounded the depth of water in anchorages. They kept track of where they were welcomed and where they found hostility, whether the people were armed, whether they seemed prosperous, whether they were seagoing or bound to the land. They did this all with a single Chinese interpreter who could not read or write. At one village on the Korean coast, an elderly man—an official or chief, they thought—came aboard the Alceste, agitated, and tried to communicate with its officers using gestures. The interpreter could not understand him. He wrote something on paper. They could not read it. Later, back at Canton, they had it translated. It read, “I don’t know who you are. What business do you have here?” Sometimes, in an act of blithe defiance, they handed out copies of Morrison’s Bible tracts. And as Captain Gower had done before them, they gave names to the landmarks they encountered—a secret kind of ownership, translating the coastal geography onto a British map for the first time: Cape Charlotte. Leopold’s Isle. Mount Ellis. Alceste Island.22
Lord Amherst and the Qing court both intended to use the earlier Macartney mission as a precedent, but unfortunately they did not agree on what exactly that precedent entailed. The ceremony of the kowtow—the ritual of nine kneeling bows with the head touched to the ground—had lurked behind the scenes for Macartney, but it only came to seem crucial to the British in hindsight. (Macartney, after all, had still been given an audience after saying he wouldn’t perform it, and in any case the demands he brought were so brazen that performing the kowtow would not have made Qianlong any more likely to grant them.) Amherst came with what he knew were much more modest requests, which he hoped would be more welcome to the court than Macartney’s. The British were no longer asking to station a permanent ambassador at the capital, and they weren’t demanding open ports or an island warehouse. They just wanted some kind of provision for direct communication between the Company staff in Canton and a high-ranking committee with the ear of the emperor in Beijing, in order to circumvent any troubles that came up with the hoppo and the governor-general. They also wanted to be able to trade freely with other Chinese businessmen in Canton besides just the Hong merchants. So while both requests were anathema to the Chinese they dealt with day-to-day at Canton (who were extremely put out by the embassy), it was within the realm of possibility that the emperor might grant them. At least the Company hoped that he would.
This time, however, the ceremonial issue that had been a mere sideshow to Macartney’s embassy took center stage. Almost as soon as the British ships anchored at the mouth of the White River in early August, a few weeks in advance of the planned audience at the imperial palace outside Beijing, the officials who came to escort Amherst to Beijing began asking him to practice his kowtow in front of a piece of yellow silk that represented the emperor, in order to show that he knew how to do it properly.23 Lord Amherst’s instructions from the British government were ambivalent on the subject: they told him to refer to Macartney’s precedent, but also not to let any “trifling punctilio” get in the way of a successful audience with the emperor.24 It was left up to him to do what he thought best. So the first time he was asked to practice his kowtow, Amherst simply referred to the example of Macartney: Macartney hadn’t kowtowed, he said, and Qianlong had still received him in audience, so he should be able to do the same.
That was not how the Chinese government claimed to remember it, however. As one of the embassy’s handlers, an official named Zhang, explained to Amherst, Macartney in fact had performed the kowtow in 1793, and that was why Qianlong had received him in audience. The Jiaqing emperor always followed the precedents of his ancestors, said Zhang, so Amherst would also have to kowtow if he wished to have an audience.25 If that weren’t enough, he also let on that Jiaqing himself remembered seeing Macartney perform the kowtow at Qianlong’s birthday celebration (Jiaqing would have been thirty-two years old at the time, hardly a child with a fanciful memory).26 The British, of course, had their own eyewitness on hand—George Staunton, who had been twelve years old in 1793 and who, for his own part, insisted that the kowtow had never taken place. The difference in written records being what it was, the issue of precedent thus came down to the emperor’s word against Staunton’s—not the sort of position a diplomat like Amherst would relish.
Jiaqing had already determined that Staunton was a devious character, and the handler Zhang, on behalf of the authorities above him, railed angrily to Robert Morrison about Staunton’s duplicity. If Staunton was such an “expert” on China, he asked Morrison, then why hadn’t he taught the ambassador how to perform the kowtow ceremony properly? Zhang said that according to information from Canton, Staunton lived a rich life down there with fine horses and luxurious apartments, and even possessed a large aviary (none of which was true, though old Beale, the ubiquitous Cantonese-speaking Prussian consul, actually did keep a rather fine aviary with peacocks and pheasants). He also said that the government was aware that Staunton had paid money to buy his position in the embassy. He was a fraud, said Zhang, and he was clearly lying to Amherst about what had happened during the Macartney mission.27 Staunton was embarrassed to be singled out, and (as Amherst explained in a report home) “merely hinted at the imperfect recollection which he could retain of transactions which took place so long ago, and at so early a period of his life.”28
It is worth considering the possibility that Jiaqing was right. Although the consistent narrative in England, common to all of the publications that came out of the Macartney mission, was that the ambassador refused to kowtow and only went down briefly on one knee before Qianlong, the twelve-year-old George Staunton’s handwritten diary from that day recorded something more ambiguous. Describing the arrival of the emperor at his tent, carried in a gilt chair by sixteen bearers, the young Staunton wrote that “we went down upon one knee and bowed our heads down to the ground.”At some later point he went back and crossed out the words “to the ground.” When Macartney approached the throne, accompanied by Staunton and his father and Mr. Plumb, young George wrote that they “walked up to the edge of the platform, and made the same ceremony as before.” When he went up himself to Qianlong’s throne, he said, “I went up and made the proper ceremony.”29
The odd part of this is the crossing out of “to the ground”—which is the point that blurs the distinction between the British and Chinese rituals enough that Jiaqing could conceivably remember the British ambassador as having knocked his head on the ground before the emperor. It is likewise unclear just what the young Staunton meant by “the proper ceremony.” At a separate point in his diary, during the banquet for the emperor’s birthday three days after the audience (which was the specific instance where Jiaqing remembered seeing Macartney kowtow), Staunton noted that he was with Macartney and his father in the midst of an assemblage of two or three hundred officials and, “at a signall being made, we bent one knee and bowed down to the ground. We repeated this ceremony nine times with the other mandarins.”30 Whether on one knee rather than two, nevertheless, the bowing completely to the ground, repeated nine times in succession, was far more accommodating to the “proper ceremony” of the Qing court than anything reported in the British accounts of the embassy.
Macartney, for his part, admitted nothing of the kind in his own journal. Rather, he wrote quite specifically that everyone there bowed repeatedly “except ourselves.”31 One wants to credit the twelve-year-old Staunton with the ingenuousness of youth and take his diary as the more candid one—which, as it turns out, can in fact be done, for the adult Staunton in 1816, in spite of his claims of “imperfect recollection,” eventually confided to Lord Amh
erst that, yes, although nobody admitted it when they got back to England, in fact Macartney had done a polite hybrid, repeating an almost-prostration nine times in order to approximate the proper Qing ceremony.32 Given the loose, voluminous robes that hid most of Macartney’s body from view, Amherst realized that his predecessor’s nine repeated deep, kneeling bows would have been nearly indistinguishable from the kowtow when viewed from a distance.33 It was clear how both sides could have come away from the audience claiming that Macartney’s ritual performance had conformed to their own expectations.
As flexible as things might have been in 1793, however, in 1816 there appeared to be no room for accommodation (and that difference, Amherst believed, was a clear sign of Jiaqing’s weakness in contrast to Qianlong’s strength). As the frustrated Zhang handed Amherst off to higher-ranking handlers en route to Beijing, the demands intensified for him to practice his kowtow so that he “might not be at a loss when the day of presentation came.” Think, those officials told Amherst, what harm might come to Britain’s trade if the ambassador were refused an audience. Think of the embarrassment of Great Britain before other countries when the news got out that they had been rejected by the emperor. Some admonished Amherst to imagine the disappointment of his son (who accompanied him as page) if, after traveling such a long distance, he was denied the opportunity to meet the emperor of China. In a mood to make concessions, and hoping that the closer he got to Beijing the more likely it was that the audience with Jiaqing would take place, Amherst agreed that he would be willing to kneel down on one knee rather than two but still bow nine times, “for the sake of uniformity,” or, if they preferred, kneel and rise nine separate times. He said it was more than he would do for any European sovereign, which seemed to please his conductors, at least temporarily. Amherst also offered to kiss the emperor’s hand as he would his own king’s, but the Chinese officials thought that was rather disgusting.34
Imperial Twilight Page 20