13. Times, September 7, 1792, p. 2 (no article title).
14. Proudfoot, Memoir of James Dinwiddie, pp. 26, 27.
15. “Letter from King George III to the Emperor of China,” in Morse, Chronicles, vol. 2, pp. 244–47.
16. Staunton, An Authentic Account, pp. 47–48.
17. Baring and Burges to Macartney, September 8, 1792, quoted in Pritchard, “The Instructions of the East India Company to Lord Macartney,” part 1, p. 210.
18. George Leonard Staunton, An Historical Account of the Embassy to the Emperor of China, undertaken by order of the King of Great Britain (London: John Stockdale, 1797), p. 20.
19. Staunton, An Historical Account, p. 21; details of visit taken from 1792 diary of Staunton’s son, in the George Thomas Staunton Papers, Rubenstein Library, Duke University, Durham, NC, accessed via Adam Matthew Digital, “China: Trade, Politics and Culture 1793–1980.”
20. Macartney’s journal, An Embassy to China, p. 231, says they were orphans or purchased; D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 117.
21. Hamilton letter to Staunton from Naples, February 21, 1792, Staunton Papers, Duke University; Mungello, The Great Encounter, p. 140.
22. Staunton, An Historical Account, p. 21. Macartney himself said they possessed “little energy or powers of persuasion”: Macartney, An Embassy to China, p. 231.
23. Macartney to Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the East India Company, from near Sumatra, March 25, 1793, British Library, India Office Records, IOR/G/12/92, fols. 16–17.
24. George Thomas Staunton letter to his mother, December 9, 1792, Staunton Papers, Duke University.
25. Robbins, Our First Ambassador, pp. 203–4; Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy to China, pp. 27–28; George Thomas Staunton diary, February 1–2, 1793, Staunton Papers, Duke University.
26. Susan Reed Stifler, “The Language Students of the East India Company’s Canton Factory,” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 69 (1938): 46–82, see p. 52; Macartney, An Embassy to China, p. 64; on Jacobus Li interpreting into Italian rather than English, see Macartney letter to Henry Dundas, November 9, 1793, British Library, India Office Records, IOR/G/12/92, fol. 35.
27. George Thomas Staunton diary for 1792–93, pp. 108, 207–9, 213–14, 223, 241; Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy, p. 54.
28. Leonard Blussé, Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 10.
29. Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy, pp. 34, 35.
30. Macartney letter to Henry Dundas from near Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, November 9, 1793, British Library, India Office Records, IOR/G/12/92, fol. 32.
31. Macartney, An Embassy to China, pp. 63, 69.
32. Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy, p. 57; William Alexander diary, entries for July 9, 11, 22, and 23, 1793.
33. William Alexander diary, entry for July 17, 1793 (“it was from us few, the Chinese were to form their opinions of the English Character”); “gaining the good will”: Staunton, An Historical Account, p. 232.
34. Staunton, An Historical Account, p. 234.
35. Macartney, An Embassy to China, pp. 69, 101.
36. Ibid., pp. 66, 74, and 75.
37. Macartney, An Embassy to China, p. 71; William Alexander diary, August 1, 1793; Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy, p. 63.
38. Macartney, An Embassy to China, pp. 77–78; “stumped along”: William Alexander diary, August 9, 1793.
39. Macartney, An Embassy to China, p. 112.
40. Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy, p. 137; Macartney, An Embassy to China, p. 114; Staunton, An Authentic Account, vol. 2, pp. 61–62.
41. Macartney, An Embassy to China, p. 114; Proudfoot, Dinwiddie, p. 51.
42. Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy, p. 138; Staunton, An Authentic Account, vol. 2, p. 8.
43. Caleb Cushing to John Nelson, July 13, 1844: “It has been supposed heretofore erroneously that a great Minister of State existed at Peking [Beijing] called the ‘Grand Colao’ whom it was proper for foreign Governments to address.” Public Documents Printed by Order of the Senate of the United States, Second Session of the Twenty-Eighth Congress (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1845), vol. 2, no. 67, p. 55.
44. Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy, pp. 139–41.
45. Ibid., pp. 148–49; the full thirty-two-page list of gifts given by Qianlong to the British embassy is in the British Library, India Office Records, IOR/G/12/92, fols. 317–49.
46. Staunton, An Authentic Account, p. 68.
47. Macartney to Dundas, November 9, 1793, British Library, India Office Records, IOR/G/12/92, fols. 56–57.
48. Staunton, An Authentic Account, pp. 68, 70.
49. Macartney, An Embassy to China, p. 118.
50. Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy, pp. 146–47.
51. Staunton, An Authentic Account, p. 77.
52. Ibid., p. 78.
53. The English original of the letter is in Morse, Chronicles, vol. 2, pp. 244–47; the Chinese translation is in Ying shi Majiaerni fang Hua dang’an shiliao huibian (Beijing: Guoji wenhua chuban gongsi, 1996), pp. 162–64.
54. Macartney, An Embassy to China, p. 124.
55. George Thomas Staunton diary for 1793–94, entry for September 14, 1793.
56. Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy, p. 148; Staunton, An Authentic Account, p. 78.
57. Ye Xiaoqing, “Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas: Tributary Drama and the Macartney Mission of 1793,” Late Imperial China 26, no. 2 (December 2005): 89–113, see p. 100.
58. Macartney, An Embassy to China, p. 143; Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy, pp. 179–80.
59. Proudfoot, Dinwiddie, p. 51. Letters read: Macartney, An Embassy to China, p. 102; Alain Peyrefitte, The Immobile Empire, trans. Jon Rothschild (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 271.
60. George Thomas Staunton diary, September 29, 1793.
61. Proudfoot, Dinwiddie, p. 53.
62. Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy, p. 171.
63. Ibid., p. 181 (changing “Pekin” to “Beijing”).
64. Proudfoot, Dinwiddie, pp. 54–55.
65. Edict of QL58/8/6 (September 10, 1793), in Ying shi Majiaerni fang Hua dang’an shiliao huibian, pp. 148–49.
66. “Letter from the Emperor of China to the King of England,” British Library, India Office Records, IOR/G/12/92, fols. 243–55; Qianlong’s original edict of QL58/8/20 (September 24, 1793) is in Ying shi Majiaerni fang Hua dang’an shiliao huibian, pp. 165–66.
67. As in the paragraph above, quotations are from the translation prepared by the East India Company at the time, except for the final lines (from “Strange and costly” onward), which, because they are so well known in that form, accord to the most commonly quoted translation of this document, a much later translation found in J. O. P. Bland and Edmund Backhouse, Annals & Memoirs of the Court of Peking (from the 16th to the 20th Century) (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1914), pp. 324–25.
68. Edict of QL58/8/29 (October 3, 1793), in Ying shi Majiaerni fang Hua dang’an shiliao huibian, pp. 172–75; the translation prepared for the British government at the time is in the British Library, India Office Records, IOR/G/12/92, fols. 283–98.
69. Macartney, An Embassy to China, p. 171.
70. Ibid., pp. 170, 211.
71. Ibid., pp. 212, 213.
72. “Embassies to China,” Chinese Repository, vol. 6 (May 1837): 17–27, see p. 18.
73. Ibid., p. 26.
74. Peter Pindar (pseudonym for John Wolcot), “Ode to the Lion Ship of War,” in The Works of Peter Pindar, Esq. (London: J. Walker, 1809), vol. 3, pp. 348–50.
75. Macartney, An Embassy to China, pp. 212–13.
76. Ibid., pp. 236, 238.
77. Ibid., p. 239.
; CHAPTER 2 Black Wind
1. “Hung-li,” in Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Taipei: SMC Publishing, Inc., 1991), vol. 1, p. 369; John E. Wills, Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 234; Mark Elliott, Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World (New York: Longman, 2009), p. 8.
2. Clae Waltham, Shu Ching: Book of History (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1971), p. 134; Ye Xiaoqing, “Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas: Tributary Drama and the Macartney Mission of 1793,” Late Imperial China 26, no. 2 (December 2005): 89–113, see p. 105.
3. Elliott, Emperor Qianlong, p. 138; Ye, “Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas,” pp. 105–6.
4. Elliott, Emperor Qianlong, p. 134; Chang Te-Ch’ang, “The Economic Role of the Imperial Household in the Ch’ing Dynasty,” Journal of Asian Studies 31, no. 2 (February 1972): 243–73, see pp. 256–59; Preston M. Torbert, The Ch’ing Imperial Household Department: A Study of Its Organization and Principal Functions, 1662–1796 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1977), p. 100 etc.
5. Population figures from Ho Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Series, 1959), pp. 23, 264, 270, and 278, as cited in Wang Wensheng, “White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Social Crises and Political Changes in the Qing Empire, 1796–1810” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2008), p. 35, n. 60.
6. Ssu-yü Teng, “Chinese Influence on the Western Examination System,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 7, no. 4 (September 1943): 267–312; Voltaire, from “Essai sur les mœurs,” and Montesquieu, from “De l’esprit des lois,” book 8, chapter 21 (Paris, 1878), both quoted in ibid., p. 281; Derek Bodde, “Chinese Ideas in the West,” prepared for the Committee on Asiatic Studies in American Education, Washington, DC, 1948.
7. Zhang Zhengmo confession, in Qing zhongqi wusheng bailianjiao qiyi ziliao (Suzhou: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1981), vol. 5, pp. 35–36; Cecily McCaffrey gives a wonderful treatment of the rebellion in the Han River Highlands in “Living through Rebellion: A Local History of the White Lotus Uprising in Hubei, China” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2003). I have been much influenced by her account.
8. Unless otherwise noted, following paragraphs based on Zhang’s confession in Qing zhongqi wusheng bailianjiao qiyi ziliao (hereafter QZQWS), vol. 5, pp. 35–36.
9. Many times over: Wang, “White Lotus Rebels,” p. 109, citing Eduard B. Vermeer, “The Mountain Frontier in Late Imperial China: Economic and Social Developments in the Bashan,” T’oung Pao, 2nd series, vol. 77, livr. 4/5 (1991): 300–329, see p. 306.
10. QZQWS, vol. 1, p. 18.
11. Kwang-Ching Liu, “Religion and Politics in the White Lotus Rebellion of 1796 in Hubei,” in Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China, ed. Kwang-Ching Liu and Richard Shek (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), p. 293.
12. Second confession of Zhang Zhengmo, QZQWS, vol. 5, pp. 36–41, see p. 37.
13. QZQWS, vol. 4, p. 165.
14. Confession of Xiang Yaoming, ibid., vol. 5, p. 4.
15. Second confession of Zhang Zhengmo, ibid., vol. 5, p. 40.
16. George Macartney, An Embassy to China: Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney during His Embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung, 1793–1794, ed. J. L. Cranmer-Byng (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1963), p. 202; George Leonard Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (Philadelphia: Robert Campbell, 1799), vol. 2, pp. 78–79.
17. Wook Yoon, “Prosperity with the Help of ‘Villains,’ 1776–1799: A Review of the Heshen Clique and Its Era,” T’oung Pao 98, issue 4/5 (2012): 479–527, p. 520.
18. Harold Kahn, Monarchy in the Emperor’s Eyes: Image and Reality in the Ch’ien-lung Reign (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 255.
19. On the Grand Council, see Wook Yoon, “Prosperity with the Help of ‘Villains,’” pp. 483–85.
20. Staunton, An Authentic Account, vol. 2, p. 66.
21. Philip Kuhn and Susan Mann, “Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part 1, ed. John K. Fairbank and Denis Twitchett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 107–62, see pp. 127–28; David Nivison, “Ho-shen and His Accusers,” in Confucianism in Action, ed. David Nivison and Arthur Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), pp. 209–43, see p. 211.
22. Nivison, “Ho-shen and His Accusers,” pp. 232–34.
23. Dai Yingcong, “Civilians Go into Battle: Hired Militias in the White Lotus War,” Asia Major, 3rd series, vol. 22, part 2 (2009): 145–78, see p. 153.
24. QZQWS, vol. 4, pp. 164, 268; McCaffrey, “Living through Rebellion,” pp. 161–62.
25. QZQWS, vol. 4, p. 267.
26. Ibid., p. 269.
27. Blaine Campbell Gaustad, “Religious Sectarianism and the State in Mid Qing China: Background to the White Lotus Uprising of 1796–1804” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1994), p. 315; Liu, “Religion and Politics in the White Lotus Rebellion,” pp. 286–87, 289, 296–97, 301; Robert Eric Entenmann, “Migration and Settlement in Sichuan, 1644–1796” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1982), pp. 236–37.
28. On Qianlong’s unwillingness to send elite Manchu banner troops, see Dai, “Civilians Go into Battle,” pp. 149, 153.
29. Dai, “Civilians Go into Battle,” pp. 153–55; Wang, “White Lotus Rebels,” pp. 304–5.
30. Dai, “Civilians,” pp. 156–58; Wang Wensheng, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 142.
31. Le Bao’s report, from Jinli xin bian, excerpted in Jiang Weiming, Chuan-Hu-Shan bailianjiao qiyi ziliao jilu (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1980), pp. 214–15.
32. Kahn, Monarchy, p. 257; Hummell, Eminent Chinese, p. 289; Wang, “White Lotus Rebels,” pp. 282, 292–94; Beatrice Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch’ing China, 1723–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 231–38.
33. Dai, “Civilians Go into Battle,” pp. 159–62.
34. Zhang Xuecheng, quoted and translated by David Nivison in The Life and Thought of Chang Hsüeh-ch’eng (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), p. 268.
35. Wang Huizu, translated by David Nivison in “Ho-shen and His Accusers,”pp. 216–17.
36. Nivison, The Life and Thought of Chang Hsüeh-ch’eng, p. 268.
37. Translation based on Wang Wensheng’s in “White Lotus Rebels,” p. 282.
38. Wang, “White Lotus Rebels,” p. 300.
CHAPTER 3 The Edge of the World
1. Canton as third-largest city in the world in 1800: Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 251. All told, Chinese cities comprised four of the top ten in the world.
2. Patrick Hanan, trans., Mirage (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2014), p. 82 (changing “Guangdong” to “Canton”).
3. George Leonard Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (Philadelphia: Robert Campbell, 1799), vol. 2, p. 360. The saga of the unfortunate seal hunters on Amsterdam Island, who would remain stranded there for more than three years, is told in the memoir of Pierre François Péron, one of the Frenchmen involved, published as Mémoires du capitaine Péron, sur ses voyages . . . , 2 vols. (Paris: Brissot-Thivars, 1824).
4. The line-of-battle sketch in Gower’s hand is in William Alexander’s diary, p. 81, William Alexander, “Journal of a voyage to Pekin in China, on board the ‘Hindostan’ E.I.M., which accompanied Lord Macartney on his embassy to the Emperor,” British Library, Add MS 35174, fol. 86.
5. Macartney to the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the East India Company, September 4, 1794, British Lib
rary, India Office Records, IOR/G/12/92, fols. 487–88; Staunton, An Authentic Account, vol. 2, p. 465.
6. Quoted in James Fichter, So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 207.
7. Herbert J. Wood, “England, China, and the Napoleonic Wars,” Pacific Historical Review 9, no. 2 (June 1940): 139–56, see p. 141.
8. Ibid., p. 142.
9. Frederic Wakeman Jr., “Drury’s Occupation of Macau and China’s Response to Early Modern Imperialism,” East Asian History 28 (December 2004): 27–34, see p. 28.
10. Ibid., p. 29.
11. George Thomas Staunton, Memoirs of the Chief Incidents of the Public Life of Sir George Thomas Staunton, Bart., printed for private circulation (London: L. Booth, 1856), pp. 15–17.
12. Staunton letter to his parents, July 28, 1799, in the George Thomas Staunton Papers, Rubenstein Library, Duke University, Durham, NC, accessed via Adam Matthew Digital, “China: Trade, Politics and Culture 1793–1980.” Interestingly enough, Macartney left China in 1793 with the impression that the Company supercargoes at Canton were going to start encouraging their junior staff to begin learning Chinese, though nothing seems to have come of that; Macartney to the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the East India Company, September 4, 1794, British Library, India Office Records, IOR/G/12/92, fol. 488.
13. Staunton to his parents, July 15, 1799, Staunton Papers, Duke University.
14. Staunton to his parents, July 28, 1799.
15. Staunton, Memoirs of the Chief Incidents, p. 25.
16. C. H. Philips, The East India Company, 1784–1834 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1940), p. 14, n. 6.
17. Jodi Rhea Bartley Eastberg, “West Meets East: British Perceptions of China through the Life and Works of Sir George Thomas Staunton, 1781–1859” (Ph.D. dissertation, Marquette University, 2009), p. 95.
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