by Julia Lovell
Before the nineteenth-century closing of the Western mind on China, a visitor touring the palaces of the Qing dynasty would have found it hard to fathom the self-identity of its ruling house. First stop might be the heartland of imperial Chinese power, the Forbidden City, its thousand-yard-long succession of audience halls and vast white-stone courtyards enclosing (within three concentric sets of walls) the Son of Heaven at the centre of his capital. Our imaginary tourist might then take the air at the emperor’s summer retreat in the north-western suburbs of the city – the Yuanmingyuan (Park of Perfect Brightness). There, our traveller would encounter a conspicuously European maze, then, a little further on, a Western-gabled mansion, its interiors draped with French tapestries and glazed with the best Venetian glass. He might subsequently choose to move on to Chengde – the summer capital in the dynasty’s Manchurian homeland north-east of the Great Wall, where he would find 1,300 acres of steppe hunting grounds scattered with Chinese pleasure pavilions and willow-fringed lakes. He might chance upon the Mongolian yurt in which the emperor received his Central Asian vassals; or stroll around ‘Little Potala’ (a red-and-white imitation of the Dalai Lama’s Lhasa residence), while gazing out over the mountains of Inner Mongolia. Set next door to one another, the Qing’s several palace complexes (Chinese, European, Manchurian, Mongolian, Tibetan) would have resembled a kind of eighteenth-century Las Vegas, expressing in microcosm the dynasty’s robust appetite for territories, peoples, religions, ideas and objects. The story of the Qing is of a great colonial enterprise, in which a Manchurian conquest minority somehow kept in check for over two and a half centuries a great patchwork of other ethnic groups: Chinese, Mongolians, Tibetans. No mean achievement for a state whose founder, Nurhaci, had begun in the 1580s as a magpie-worshipping ginseng trader with only thirteen suits of armour to protect his followers.
Even the origins of the Manchus were untidily heterogeneous: they had started out as a blur of hunting, fishing, farming, pearl-gathering semi-Mongolicized tribes known as Jurchens, for whom Ming China had used the nervous shorthand ‘wild people’.11 The architects of the Qing conquest, Nurhaci and his extraordinarily tough son Hung Taiji, had been notably pragmatic in their hungry quest to build an empire, attracting and rewarding literate Chinese immigrants to the north-east to run the increasingly complex machinery of their rising state (formally established in 1616). The Manchu armies that conquered China to establish the Qing dynasty in 1644 were dominated by Chinese collaborators and weapons.
Although China – with its high agricultural yields, urban economies and cultivated elites – was a fine prize, it was only one of the land masses that the Qing bolted together across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By 1634, Hung Taiji had secured allegiances from Inner Mongolia. Anxious that the Zunghars – a grouping of independent tribes in Outer Mongolia and eastern Turkestan (present-day Xinjiang) – might pose a threat in conjunction with Romanov Russia, the second Qing Emperor, Kangxi, turned his attention to the Zunghar leader, Galdan. Within ten years, Galdan had been isolated, betrayed and poisoned, his bones crushed and scattered through the streets of Beijing as a stern warning to other potential resisters of Qing will.12 Scenting trouble from an alliance between the western Mongols and Tibet, Kangxi occupied and garrisoned Tibet, transforming the Panchen Lama into a Qing protégé and marking the end of the territory’s political independence – all the while bringing to heel a Ming-loyalist regime on Taiwan. At the end of it all, Qing emperors could realistically proclaim themselves the Lord of Lords: the Confucian Son of Heaven, the Khan of the Mongol Khans and the Patron-in-Chief of Tibetan Buddhism.
Expansion, then, was the keynote of Qing rule, and early Qing emperors led by example. Kangxi delighted in the opportunity to leave court life for the freedom of steppe campaigns. ‘In two years,’ he wrote from a corpse-strewn Gobi desert, ‘I made three journeys, across deserts combed by wind and bathed with rain, eating every other day, in the barren and uninhabited deserts . . . My life is happy, fulfilled – I have what I wanted.’13 Although his son and grandson – the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors – preferred civilian life to the gales of the north-west, both delegated their generals to push hard on the empire’s northern and southern frontiers. In old age, Qianlong styled himself the ‘Old Man of the Ten Utter Victories’, generating some 1,500 poems and essays commemorating his wars, to be scratched (in the several languages incorporated into the Qing conquest – Chinese, Manchu, Mongol, Arabi, Uighur) onto hundreds of monumental war memorials littered across the empire. He revelled in the rituals of war, presiding over the grand receptions, banquets, elephant processions and ritual drawing and quartering of prisoners acted out at the gate to the Forbidden City, often before international – Dutch, Korean, Japanese – audiences.
It took, though, something more sophisticated than brute force to keep this empire in one piece. True political omnivores, Qing emperors took an intense interest in almost any source of cultural, practical or religious leverage – Confucian, Buddhist or European – over their various peoples.
Somewhere near the centre of Qing government lay a collection of ideas about managing the world that could be termed Confucianism. For once the population of China proper had been forcibly compelled – on pain of death – to wear the badge of submission to their foreign conquerors (the Manchu shaved forehead and long braided queue that would, illogically, become the trademark of the pantomime Chinaman in Western minds), the Qing were anxious to prove themselves faithful inheritors of ancient Chinese statecraft. Since the establishment of the Han dynasty in 206 bc (when the Confucian Lu Jia thought aloud to the dynasty’s militantly anti-intellectual founder, ‘You have vanquished the empire on horseback; but can you rule it on horseback?’), Confucianism had served as the moral glue holding together a long succession of regimes founded on violent conquest.
Confucius – who himself lived through an era of ruthless interstate conflict – preached a philosophy of harmonious submission. The Chinese world, he believed, would prosper not through violence, but through careful maintenance of hierarchy. His great, popularizing innovation was to scale his political philosophy down into the manageable analogy of family relationships: to equate the bond between father and son (or elder brother and younger brother; husband and wife) with that between ruler and subject. Good fathers and sons, his logic went, make good rulers and subjects, bringing the empire back to its rightful state of peaceful unity; perform your own social role properly, and the country will prosper. At the centre of all these relationships sat the emperor, whose mandate to rule depended on his own cultivation of the values of Confucian scripture. In 1670, therefore, the warlike Kangxi emperor had reinvented himself as a hearth-and-home Confucian, indoctrinating his millions of new subjects in the philosopher’s submissive virtues of obedience, loyalty, thrift and hard work.
When it came to governing the peoples of Inner Asia, Qing rulers reinvented themselves, in turn, as the descendants of Genghis Khan, as patrons of Tibetan Lamaism, as secretive earthly mediators with the Buddhist spirit guide of the dead – all in the interests of wielding spiritual (and therefore political) power over Tibet and Mongolia. Qianlong advertised himself not only as the Confucian Son of Heaven and the Khan of Khans, but also as the messianic ‘wheel-turning king’ (cakravartin) of Tibetan Buddhist scripture, whose virtuous conquests were rolling the world on towards salvation.
Again in the interests of state-strengthening, the Qing borrowed happily from Europe. Taking advantage of Catholic Europe’s naive eagerness to gain access to a vast new empire of conversion opportunity, Qing emperors exploited a series of talented Jesuit priests – Belgians, Germans, Italians – who rose to the many tasks set them by the imperial will: in astronomy, engineering, surveying, weapon-building, personal tutoring (the Kangxi emperor had a German maths and astronomy teacher); conjuring up clocks, mechanical sing-songs, harpsichord lessons, hydraulics, medicines, sextants, palaces, bluebells. European ingenuity was also put to military uses. In
1673, the Kangxi emperor threatened all Jesuits with expulsion from China unless they helped manufacture cannon to defeat a massive southern rebellion; when his Belgian director of the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy, Ferdinand Verbiest, obliged (blessing and naming after a saint each of the 500 cannon he produced), Kangxi offered him his own sable coat in gratitude. Across the next century, Jesuits served variously as cannon-makers, artillery instructors and negotiators in arms sales between the Qing and European merchants in Canton.
At the end of conquest, the Jesuits were again deployed, to draw up maps communicating the frontiers of the Qing triumph to regional competitors such as the Romanov empire. Between 1708 and 1718, the Kangxi emperor commissioned from his faithful servants a multilingual survey and atlas of the entire realm – from the Korean border to Tibet – that combined the latest Chinese and European cartographical techniques. The great Qianlong could barely suppress his delight at the new extent of his dominions after 1750, scrawling the gleeful ‘unprecedented’ over maps drawn up to mark his latest conquests.
How, then, did nineteenth-century warmongers become so ready to respond to the ‘provocation’ of Lin’s siege of March 1839? Why, despite the obviously cosmopolitan basis of Qing power, did merchants, missionaries and policy-makers begin so confidently to denounce the empire as exclusive? What had they glimpsed or encountered that turned them against the country?
The answer, in part, lies in the ways in which the Qing sought to control its encounters with Europeans. As it looked to manage the world outside its borders, Chinese statecraft for nearly two millennia had used a form of tribute system. By this reckoning, China was a universal empire (tianxia, ‘all under heaven’), whose authority – cohering around elaborately literate political and cultural traditions – in theory radiated indefinitely outward to civilize non-Chinese neighbours. According to Han-dynasty political geography, China was divided into five concentric zones: the inner three ruled directly by the Chinese king, while the outer two were occupied by barbarians; all five zones owed tribute and ritual obeisance to the universally sage Chinese emperor (the ‘Son of Heaven’), thereby affirming their status as vassals. Simply and economically, the tribute system transformed the Confucian principle of hierarchical submission into a universal model for foreign relations. The world, according to the sino-centric ideal at least, revolved around China.
In truth, all the way through Chinese history, the tribute system was little more than a fudge for other, more pragmatic realities. Between the Han and Qing dynasties, parts, and sometimes all of China were conquered by tribes from the northern steppe, the last of which founded the Qing in 1644. The hierarchical facade of tributary homage could serve equally as a face-saving front for trade; or as a kind of diplomatic protection racket, operating at a financial loss to the empire. The Chinese court would offer subsidies to warlike neighbours in exchange for objects of often no particular value or use and the promise not to attack Chinese territory. Imperial China’s foreign policy-makers over the centuries had combined tributary etiquette with economic incentives and diplomacy, and even with the laissez-faire ‘loose-rein’ policy, by which distant peoples who chose to pay court to the Chinese centre would not be refused, while those who did not would be left in peace.
Nonetheless, at the start of the Ming dynasty in 1368, the sino-centric vision was at last formalized into a body of codes and rituals to which foreign visits to court were to conform. On entering the frontier, envoys would be escorted slowly to the capital, where they would be banqueted, required to kowtow to the emperor, banqueted, entertained by music, gifted, handed an edict expressing the imperial response to whatever demands they may have raised and banqueted again. With some adaptations and simplifications, the Qing dynasty inherited the principle and spirit of the Ming version, using the system to regulate relations both with its more familiar neighbours (Korea, Vietnam, Thailand) and with new visitors from Europe eager to trade for China’s prized exports.
By the eighteenth century, Europeans – and Britons especially – were finding the whole farrago infuriating. As Dutch, Portuguese, sometimes Russian and (latterly) British embassies progressed sedately to the feet of the Son of Heaven, they began to mutter increasingly loudly about their frustrations at the system: at its restrictive bureaucratic routine; at the court’s demeaning insistence on the kowtow; at the absence of opportunity for straight-talking negotiation and for getting what they wanted – notably free trade, consular representation and diplomatic equality.
When the British sent their first mission in 1792–3 to establish free trade with China, their ambassador – George, Lord Macartney – grew openly impatient with the system’s elaborate ceremonial. As the British economy agitated over its tea-fuelled trade deficit with China, George III dispatched his representative together with the finest fruits of European science and culture – telescopes, clocks, barometers, airguns, a hot-air balloon – to dazzle Qianlong into opening free trade with Britain, by convincing him that he and his 313 million people needed Britain’s technological marvels. The entire trip took Macartney a good two years, of which several months were spent crawling up the rivers and roads of the Chinese interior to the emperor’s summer retreat at Chengde and wrangling over issues of diplomatic etiquette: whether or not the British gifts counted as ‘tribute’, or ‘gifts’ (from a diplomatic equal); whether Macartney would kowtow to the emperor.
But Qianlong wanted little to do with George III’s demands for free-trading rights in China and for a permanent British embassy in Beijing. ‘We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures’, Qianlong explained in his official response to the British king – a communication that has subsequently become shorthand for Qing China’s delusions of supremacy over the rest of the globe.14 China, Macartney concluded, was ‘an old crazy first rate man-of-war’ fated to be ‘dashed to pieces on the shore’.15 Macartney’s failure – disseminated soon after his return in the published diary of his travels, and in the peevish travel memoirs of his entourage – edged British public opinion on China closer towards the shorter-tempered nineteenth-century vision of an arrogant, ritual-obsessed empire that had to be blasted ‘with a couple of frigates’ into the modern, civilized world of free trade.16
Again, however, the Qing world would probably not have recognized itself in Britain’s caricature. Far from self-sufficient, Qing China was fully – vulnerably – dependent on international commerce to bring in the essentials of existence: rice, pepper, sugar, copper and wood from south-east Asia, Taiwan, Japan and Korea; and New World silver to pay its taxes, and therefore government and armies.17 Early nineteenth-century European travellers around China’s fringes reported the population’s eagerness for trade and for foreign goods – wool, opium, even Bible tracts. Neither did Chinese merchants wait passively for useful items to come their way from abroad. Instead, China’s booming population spilled across the seas in search of business and labouring opportunities (boatbuilding, sawmilling, mining, pawnbroking, hauling), mostly in south-east Asia, Ceylon or Africa; a handful (of barbers, scholars, Christian converts) straggled out as far as France, Italy, Portugal, Mexico. Only a state of emergency would persuade the authorities to shut down maritime trade. During the war to recover Taiwan from Ming loyalists in 1661, Kangxi shifted coastal populations twenty miles inland, to starve out the island; the ban was promptly rescinded in 1684, once the breakaway regime had been ousted. A 1740 Dutch massacre in Batavia of more than 10,000 Chinese residents did not offer sufficient cause to ban trade – and neither, for long, did the outbreak of the Opium War.
So if the British simply wanted to trade, Qianlong pointed out in his reply to George III, they already could do so, down at Canton – which many of them quite contentedly were doing. Reminiscing in the 1880s, that old China hand William Hunter regretted the passing of the antebellum Canton trade – even the demolition of the old factory buildings whose position outside the city walls was the cause of much c
ontroversy between foreign traders and locals. ‘The business transacted within their walls was incalculable, and I think I am safe in saying that . . . the novelty of the life, the social good feeling and unbounded hospitality always mutually existing . . . the facility of all dealings with the Chinese who were assigned to transact business with us, together with their proverbial honesty, combined with a sense of perfect security to person and property.’18 His elegy reveals a world characterized not by mutual suspicion, bureaucratic conceit and numbing hierarchy, but rather by trust, good will and fine dining. He recalls jovial dinners at the houses of the imperially appointed Hong merchants, serving up ‘such delicacies as birds’-nest soup, with plovers’ eggs, and Beche-de-Mer, curiously prepared sharks’ fins and roasted snails . . . it is not true, as has been supposed, that on these convivial occasions the guests were served with roast or boiled “puppy” as a bonne bouche’.19 Such, he claims, was the good faith existing between Europeans and Chinese that there was no use of written receipts or promissory notes. On one occasion, a Chinese merchant – out of friendship – wrote off a foreign merchant’s debt for 72,000 dollars; more often, the credit flowed in the opposite direction, with the Hong traders substantially in debt to the Europeans.
It was true, nonetheless, that the Qing state was far more devoted to regulating the European than it was the Asian junk trade. And a discontented British minority concluded from the limits imposed on them a general principle of Qing xenophobia. More careful consideration of the matter would have revealed a political design behind the entire scheme. European sailors of the two centuries before Macartney’s arrival had not been on their best behaviour when approaching the Chinese coast. The Portuguese, the first Europeans to make a concerted effort to penetrate mainland China under the Ming dynasty, had barged undiplomatically up to Canton – building a fort, buying Chinese children, trading at will. The first British merchant to introduce himself memorably to the Chinese authorities was one Captain John Weddell who, in 1637, similarly forced his way up to Canton aspiring to ‘do all the spoils . . . [he] could unto the Chinois.’20 While deliberating on how to handle the Macartney embassy, the Qing court pondered accounts of the British absorption of India. ‘Among the western ocean states, England ranks foremost in strength’, Qianlong secretly communicated to his Grand Minister. ‘It is said that the English have robbed and exploited the merchant ships of the other western ocean states so that the foreigners along the western ocean are terrified of their brutality.’21 The British, the emperor observed, were ever-ready to take advantage of slack military discipline on the coast. The accuracy of Qianlong’s assessment of British ambitions in Asia would be borne out by the events of 1839–42 and beyond.