Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  The embassy’s seniormost chaperone, whom the British knew as “the Duke,” was a high-ranking Manchu named Heshitai, brother-in-law to the emperor, who received them at the canal port of Tongzhou for the final overland leg to the capital. He was especially adamant about the kowtow ceremony. “Heaven does not have two suns,” he told Amherst and his interpreters on August 22, “and Earth does not have two rulers.” If Amherst did not perform the kowtow exactly as expected—touching the head to the ground rather than just bowing, and kneeling on two knees rather than just one—then, the Duke threatened, he would be expelled from the capital without an audience and his gifts would be rejected. When Amherst protested through Morrison that the previous embassy had met with more flexibility, the Duke was dismissive: “The affairs of the last Embassy were its own affairs,” he said; “those of the present Embassy alone are what we will converse about.”35

  In the end, Lord Amherst didn’t really see what all the fuss was about, so on August 27, a few days before the planned audience, he decided that he would just go ahead and perform the kowtow as requested.36 It seemed the polite thing to do, after all, to follow the customs of the court to which he had been sent. Given all the expense and the long journey, it did not seem to him like something worth risking an audience over—and since Jiaqing believed with good reason that Macartney had done it for Qianlong, it would be an insult for Amherst not to do the same. Henry Ellis, the secretary to the mission, agreed with Amherst completely. He did not see how hairsplitting distinctions between bowing and prostration, between kneeling on one knee or two, were in any way grounds for jeopardizing the goals of the embassy. For his part, as a budding imperialist fresh from India, it was less about being respectful than the fact that he considered all such Oriental customs to be, in his words, “absurd pretensions.” Ceremonies like the kowtow, to his mind, were “ridiculous”—and thus meaningless—so what would be the harm in performing them for show, if it would get you what you wanted?37 Many in England would agree with him.

  As it turned out, the only person on the British side who cared deeply about the issue was George Staunton. It is hard to judge his motives—he claimed principle and national honor, but the memory of his father’s failed mission, redeemed afterward only by the pride of not having submitted to the kowtow, was also at stake. If Lord Amherst were to succeed by abandoning the precedent of Macartney and Staunton’s father (at least as they had claimed it), then the previous embassy might as well be written off completely, as if it had been led by a group of inflexible buffoons too stubborn to make diplomacy work. So when Amherst said that he planned to go ahead with the ceremony, Staunton begged him to wait. He asked for time to refer the question to the “Canton gentlemen”—a group that included Manning and Morrison and the three junior Company personnel who had come along. These men, he told Amherst, had a greater knowledge of China and therefore a keener sense of whether the kowtow would be damaging to British interests.

  The deck was well stacked in Staunton’s favor. All of the “Canton gentlemen” were either professionally subordinate to or personally indebted to him. Since he was the pathbreaker who had made their language studies possible, and was the reigning president of the select committee—who, furthermore, took this issue quite personally—there is little chance they would have contradicted him in front of Amherst. The three junior staff, as may be expected, agreed with him immediately. Manning, however, was “more qualified” in his agreement, Staunton admitted. He thought that in general it was fine to perform the kowtow (he himself had, after all, done it eagerly and repeatedly before the Dalai Lama), but he came to agree with Staunton that under the circumstances, with such uncivil pressure from their hosts, it might not be best for Amherst to give in. Robert Morrison was the lone dissenter, stating that he saw no harm in it for the Company’s interests.38

  The majority was enough for Staunton to declare victory. “I reported these results to Lord Amherst and Mr. Ellis,” he wrote in a private account, “and begged that they would accordingly consider my opinion as final.”39 They did. Deferring to Staunton’s vaunted China expertise—and going against his own better judgment—Lord Amherst had his secretary Ellis draft a letter to the effect that the ambassador would be glad to kneel on one knee and bow however many times the emperor should like, and that he would “consider it the most fortunate occurrence of my life to be enabled thus to show my profound devotion to the most potent Emperor in the Universe,” but nevertheless he “found it absolutely impossible” to perform the kowtow as specified. Morrison dutifully translated the statement into Chinese, and one of the junior linguists brought it to the Duke.40

  The next morning, the travelers saw the last of their baggage and gifts offloaded from the river junks at Tongzhou in preparation for the final leg of their journey, twelve miles overland to the imperial palace outside Beijing. The air was full of optimism. A friendly message had come from the emperor, addressed to Amherst’s son, apparently in memory of the general delight created by little George Staunton when he spoke Chinese with Qianlong in 1793. The Jiaqing emperor asked the boy how old he was, and whether he had read any Chinese books. He said he looked forward to seeing him in Beijing.41 Once the transfer of the luggage was complete, the British travelers came ashore and were loaded into a Chinese caravan of sedan chairs and wooden wagons—all except for the three commissioners and Amherst’s son, who rode in a British-made carriage that had been unpacked from their capacious baggage and was now drawn by four mules.

  In the late afternoon with the sun headed lower in the sky, they set out with their handlers and a military guard along the wide, stone-paved road to the capital. The procession stopped just once, around seven in the evening, for dinner at a run-down hostel one of the travelers described as being “just like the stable-yard of an inn,” where they sat down to what Amherst himself called a “disgusting repast” of boiled, half-plucked fowl (intended, touchingly enough, to be an approximation of English cuisine, at least as far as their Chinese hosts understood it).42 None found the dinner appetizing, but they were still surprised and put out when their escorts hurried them onward after only a short rest. The hour was getting late, they were told, the sun was setting, and the gates to Beijing were always shut at night—though the handler Zhang assured Staunton that the city’s eastern gate would be kept open for their arrival. Zhang also mentioned that the emperor would receive Amherst on the morning after his arrival, but that seemed too soon to Staunton, who ignored him, assuming it was just a story he was making up to urge them along.43

  A surreal journey followed. Night fell long before they reached Beijing. Miles from the city, crowds of spectators began assembling by the side of the road in the murky darkness to watch them, holding up little paper lanterns on sticks that cast a flickering yellow glow over their shadowed faces and the edges of the road. It was near midnight by the time the travelers reached the looming eastern wall of Beijing, so high they could barely make out its towers against the black sky above. The massive outer gate, contrary to what Zhang had promised, was shut. They could not enter the city. So they had to turn and continue their slow march along a rugged secondary road that circled the perimeter of the city wall, miles out of their original way through the pitch dark, at the pace of a man walking. The springless wooden carts of the caravan were so uncomfortable on the bumping, uneven path that several of the men simply got out and hiked the distance.

  Traveling through the night without rest, the beleaguered embassy finally arrived at the imperial palace northwest of Beijing at dawn, disheveled and stinking. It was a beautiful scene in its way, ornate gardens illuminated by the rising sun, dim mountains visible in the distance. Most of the exhausted British entourage were told to wait behind while Amherst, Staunton, Ellis, and Morrison were brought forward with a few of the others and deposited into a small, elegant waiting chamber with windows on four sides, about seven by twelve feet, surrounded by a crowd of ministers wearing buttons of various rank, who were milling about and
apparently waiting for something.44

  It was then announced that Amherst’s audience would take place immediately—in fact, he was already late for it and the emperor was at that moment mounting his throne in preparation to receive him. The ministers were all assembled and waiting (thus explaining the crowd outside of Amherst’s chamber), and the Duke would be coming in a moment to escort Amherst into the audience hall for his long-awaited meeting with Jiaqing. At this, Amherst broke down. He wasn’t ready, he protested. Not only was he bleary and unkempt, but his special outfit for the audience was still in his baggage, which hadn’t arrived yet. (Amherst had brought his coronation robes for the occasion; Staunton, in emulation of his father, had gotten a tailor in Canton to replicate a Cambridge academic gown for him.) Amherst did not even have the letter from the prince regent that he was supposed to present to the emperor. He said he would not go.

  The Duke soon arrived in a flurry of motion, clearing a path through the crowd of ministers. Amherst had to go to the audience, he said. Amherst, speaking through Robert Morrison, refused. The Duke argued with him, politely but firmly, and Amherst still refused. Finally, the Duke told him that if he must, he could even perform his own ceremony of kneeling. (It is worth noting that for all the fuss the British would eventually make over the kowtow, neither of their ambassadors was actually denied an audience for refusing to do it.) By then, however, Amherst had made up his mind firmly and refused to budge. The kowtow didn’t matter; he wanted time to get cleaned up, and he needed his baggage. He wanted to rest.

  The crowd of officials who had assembled for the audience began filing into Amherst’s waiting chamber, jostling in their curiosity to get a look at the foreign ambassador and his retinue in their strange costumes, trying to overhear the argument between Morrison and the Duke. The air was close. Mandarins and servants of all ranks and ages pushed into the room while others filled the open windows, pressing for an angle to gratify their “brutal curiosity,” as the unnerved Ellis termed it. A gnawing panic set in among the British, a feeling of being trapped. “They seemed to regard us rather as wild beasts than mere strangers of the same species with themselves,” said Ellis.45 Amherst’s physician seethed, “We could not but be sensible that we were in the hands of a despotic and capricious government.” The princes, officials, and eunuchs, he wrote, had “infested the apartment” and “looked upon us as a strange species of animal.”46

  Then it all went to hell. The Duke, summoning another official to help him, grabbed hold of Amherst by the arm as if to drag him on his way to the emperor. Amherst threw off their hands violently and shoved the surprised Duke backwards. Amherst’s attendants leapt forward to his defense, reaching for their swords and getting ready, in Amherst’s words, “to resist force by force.”47 The flustered ambassador, regaining a bit of his composure, quickly ordered his men to sheathe their weapons, fearing what might result. Desperate and claustrophobic, Amherst tried to push his way out of the room, but there were too many people, pressing in too close. He couldn’t get out. It was the Duke who finally took pity on him. He snatched a whip from a guard and began violently beating the crowd of court officials and eunuchs to clear a path for Amherst to escape, knocking them to the ground as they scrambled to get out of the way of his lash.48

  The audience, most assuredly, did not happen.

  As it turned out, the melee at the waiting chamber wasn’t even the worst of it. On the evening of November 13, while Amherst, Staunton, and the others were still making their slow journey back down to Canton via the inland route after failing to meet with the emperor, five hundred miles to their south the Alceste—back now from its surveying mission along the northern coast—was unleashing its full broadside of thirty-two-pounders against one of the Chinese forts guarding the Tiger’s Mouth at the river entrance to Canton, blasting it into silence and killing a reported forty-seven Chinese soldiers as it pushed toward Whampoa under a sustained fire of dozens of cannons from shore.49

  The Alceste had returned from its explorations earlier that month. Limping back to Canton due to storm damage, it anchored off an island in the Pearl River delta and its captain, a veteran Royal Navy officer named Murray Maxwell, requested permission to sail up to the Whampoa anchorage below Canton to make repairs before Lord Amherst returned from Beijing. Maxwell was, in response, taunted by a representative of the governor-general with the news that Amherst had been sent away from the capital without an audience. The local officials had won. No motion was made to give the Alceste permission to continue up to Whampoa.

  After a week of waiting at the outlying island—where the Alceste was surrounded by war junks and supplies were only brought on board under cover of darkness—Captain Maxwell grew tired of being put off and decided to force his way up the river without a pass. Soon after the Alceste got under way, it was confronted by a Chinese fleet sent to turn it back. Maxwell and the Chinese ships exchanged a round of blank-shotted salutes, which quickly gave way to warning shots, and then to live fire. Then everything broke down as the Alceste ran out her guns and began blasting away at the Chinese coastal defenses, working her way up the river channel to the Whampoa anchorage where Captain Maxwell (who would be knighted when he got home) felt his ship belonged.

  The Alceste’s surgeon, at least, found the affair rather exciting—“The flashing of the guns on the glassy surface of the river, and the rolling echo of their reports along the adjoining hills, had a very grand and animating effect,” he recalled. Despite the great number of Chinese killed by her guns, the Alceste suffered no casualties, just a couple of hullings and much damage to her rigging. When the shooting finally paused, Chinese boats continued to track the British ship carefully, but—perhaps in mutual realization that this was supposed to be a diplomatic visit—both sides refrained from further escalation.50

  Neither side knew quite what to make of the British embassy’s sudden turn toward disaster. To the British themselves, it seemed like a dream. Generally, the members of the embassy blamed Jiaqing. “We could only conjecture,” wrote Amherst’s physician, “that we had been hurried [out] and subjected to all kinds of indignity and inconvenience to suit the will of a capricious despot.”51 Jiaqing himself, meanwhile, was equally mystified. The embassy’s handlers had misled him about Amherst’s reluctance to kowtow, giving him no reason to imagine that the audience might not take place as planned. He thus had no idea why the British ambassador did not appear when he was expected (sickness was claimed, but when the emperor sent his own physician to attend to Amherst, he turned out to be perfectly healthy). So he initially blamed the rudeness entirely on Amherst himself, but after some investigation he determined that the debacle was in fact the fault of the escorting officials—above all, the Duke—who had been lying to him about Amherst’s misgivings in order not to displease him. Jiaqing issued a scathing edict blaming the Amherst mission’s handlers for incompetence and dishonesty, and referring them to the Board of Punishments for discipline.52

  Most poignantly, though, far from being a “capricious despot” who didn’t care a whit for foreign visitors, behind the scenes Jiaqing had in fact been quite determined to make sure the British visit went well. He was more willing to accommodate them than they knew. Three days before the aborted audience, he commented in an edict that the Duke should, if necessary, be flexible about whether Amherst would kowtow (indicating, as he did so, that his father Qianlong had shown at least some measure of accommodation to Macartney in 1793). “Do not be so severe and exacting about ceremonials that you lose track of the etiquette for managing foreigners,” he instructed the Duke; “it was just like this in 1793, and we made the best of the situation then. Generally speaking, it is better to meet with them than to send them away.”53 Though Amherst and his entourage would blame Jiaqing’s arrogance for the failure of the embassy, the emperor very much wanted to have a successful meeting, even if it meant compromising on the external trappings of ceremony. He too was disappointed that the British visit failed to result in a
friendly audience.

  As quickly as the acts of hostility burst forth, they were covered over by mutual embarrassment. When the Alceste reached Whampoa, its guns still stinking of powder, an official came down to the anchorage on the governor-general’s behalf and welcomed the ship to Canton as if nothing had happened.54 After the violence at the waiting chamber, Amherst was ushered politely on his way with no further mention of the scuffle that had broken out. When he first reached the riverboats at Tongzhou that would begin the mission’s four-month inland journey back to Canton, a courier caught up to him with a conciliatory edict from the emperor, who sent some gifts for the king—a ceremonial jade scepter, some silk purses, a string of imperial beads. Jiaqing said that while he could not under such circumstances accept most of Amherst’s presents, as a token of good faith he would keep the portraits Amherst had brought of the king and queen, as well as a book of prints and an atlas.

  The edict that accompanied the presents, addressed to the king of England, was written the day after the failed audience when Jiaqing still blamed Amherst. In it, Jiaqing commended the king’s “feelings of sincere devotion to me,” as represented by his having sent an ambassador over such a long journey across the oceans to China. But he also regretted that “your ambassador, it would seem, does not understand how to practice the rites and ceremonies” of the Qing Empire. He made it clear that he did not consider this to be the fault of the king himself, just the result of a poorly chosen representative. Nevertheless, as if to ensure that the mutual embarrassment would not be repeated again, Jiaqing politely asked the king to please refrain from sending any more diplomats. “In the future,” he wrote, “there is no reason you should have to send another ambassador from so great a distance and give him the trouble of crossing over the mountains and seas.” If the king would just tend to the boundaries of his own empire, he said, and feel “dutiful submission” within his own heart, there would be no need for a British mission ever to come to China again.55