On China (7 page)

All of this took place within the intricate framework of Chinese protocol, which showed Macartney the most considerate treatment in foiling and rejecting his proposals. Enveloped in all-encompassing protocol and assured that each aspect had a cosmically ordained and unalterable purpose, Macartney found himself scarcely able to begin his negotiations. Meanwhile he noted with a mixture of respect and unease the efficiency of China’s vast bureaucracy, assessing that “every circumstance concerning us and every word that falls from our lips is minutely reported and remembered.”
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To Macartney’s consternation, the technological wonders of Europe left no visible impression on his handlers. When his party demonstrated their mounted cannons, “our conductor pretended to think lightly of them, and spoke to us as if such things were no novelties in China.”
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His lenses, chariot, and hot-air balloon were brushed aside with polite condescension.

A month and a half later, the ambassador was still waiting for an audience with the Emperor, the interval having been consumed by banquets, entertainment, and discussions about the appropriate protocol for a possible imperial audience. Finally, he was summoned at four o’clock in the morning to “a large, handsome tent” to await the Emperor, who presently appeared with great ceremony, borne in a palanquin. Macartney wondered at the magnificence of Chinese protocol, in which “every function of the ceremony was performed with such silence and solemnity as in some measure to resemble the celebration of a religious mystery.”
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After bestowing gifts on Macartney and his party, the Emperor flattered the British party by “sen[ding] us several dishes from his own table” and then giving “to each of us, with his own hands, a cup of warm wine, which we immediately drank in his presence.”
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(Note that having the Emperor personally serve wine to foreign envoys was specifically mentioned among the Han Dynasty’s five baits for barbarian management.)
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The next day, Macartney and party attended a convocation to celebrate the Emperor’s birthday. Finally, the Emperor summoned Macartney to his box at a theater performance. Now, Macartney assumed, he could transact the business of his embassy. Instead, the Emperor rebuffed him with another gift, a box of precious stones and, Macartney recorded, “a small book, written and painted by his own hand, which he desired me to present to the King, my master, as a token of his friendship, saying that the box had been eight hundred years in his family.”
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Now that these tokens of imperial benevolence had been bestowed, the Chinese officials suggested that in view of the approaching cold winter, the time for Macartney’s departure had arrived. Macartney protested that the two sides had yet to “enter into negotiation” on the items in his official instructions; he had “barely opened his commission.” It was King George’s wish, Macartney stressed, that he be allowed to reside at the Chinese court as a permanent British ambassador.

Early in the morning of October 3, 1793, a mandarin awoke Macartney and summoned him in full ceremonial dress to the Forbidden City, where he was to receive the answer to his petition. After a wait of several hours, he was ushered up a staircase to a silk-covered chair, upon which sat not the Emperor, but a letter from the Emperor to King George. The Chinese officials kowtowed to the letter, leaving Macartney to kneel to the letter on one knee. Finally, the imperial communication was transported back to Macartney’s chambers with full ceremony. It proved to be one of the most humiliating communications in the annals of British diplomacy.

The edict began by remarking on King George’s “respectful humility” in sending a tribute mission to China:

The Emperor then dismissed every substantive request that Macartney had made, including the proposal that Macartney be permitted to reside in Beijing as a diplomat:

The proposal that China send its own ambassador to London, the edict continued, was even more absurd:

Perhaps, the Emperor ascertained, King George had sent Macartney to learn the blessings of civilization from China. But this, too, was out of the question:

As for Macartney’s proposals regarding the benefits of trade between Britain and China, the Celestial Court had already shown the British great favor allowing them “full liberty to trade at Canton for many a year”; anything more was “utterly unreasonable.” As for the supposed benefits of British trade to China, Macartney was sadly mistaken:

Given this state of affairs, trade beyond what was already taking place was impossible. Britain had nothing to offer that China wanted, and China had already given Britain all that its divine regulations permitted.

Since it appeared that there was nothing more to be done, Macartney decided to return to England via Guangzhou. As he prepared to depart, he observed that after the Emperor’s sweeping rejection of Britain’s requests, the mandarins were, if anything, more attentive, causing Macartney to reflect that perhaps the court had had second thoughts. He inquired to that effect, but the Chinese were done with diplomatic courtesy. Since the barbarian supplicant did not seem to understand subtlety, he was treated to an imperial edict verging on the threatening. The Emperor assured King George that he was aware of “the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea.” But the Chinese capital was “the hub and center about which all quarters of the globe revolve. . . . The subjects of our dependencies have never been allowed to open places of business in Peking [Beijing].” He concluded with an admonition:

The Emperor, clearly unfamiliar with the capacity of Western leaders for violent rapaciousness, was playing with fire, though he did not know it. The assessment with which Macartney left China was ominous:

However overbearing the Chinese conduct may seem now, one must remember that it had worked for centuries in organizing and sustaining a major international order. In Macartney’s era, the blessings of trade with the West were far from self-evident: since China’s GDP was still roughly seven times that of Britain’s, the Emperor could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that it was London that needed Beijing’s assistance and not the other way around.
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No doubt the imperial court congratulated itself on deft handling of this barbarian mission, which was not repeated for over twenty years. But the reason for this respite was less the skill of Chinese diplomacy than the Napoleonic Wars, which consumed the resources of the European states. No sooner was Napoleon disposed of than a new British mission appeared off China’s coasts in 1816, led by Lord Amherst. This time the standoff over protocol devolved into a physical brawl between the British envoys and the court mandarins assembled outside the throne room. When Amherst refused to kowtow to the Emperor, whom the Chinese insisted on referring to as “the universal sovereign,” his mission was dismissed abruptly. Britain’s Prince Regent was commanded to endeavor with “obedience” to “make progress towards civilized transformation”; in the meantime, no further ambassadors were necessary “to prove that you are indeed our vassal.”
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In 1834, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston sent another mission to attempt a grand resolution. Palmerston, not known for his expertise in Qing dynastic regulations, dispatched the Scottish naval officer Lord Napier with the contradictory instructions to “conform to the laws and usages of China” while, at the same time, requesting permanent diplomatic relations and a resident British embassy in Beijing, access to further ports along the Chinese coast, and, for good measure, free trade with Japan.
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Upon Napier’s arrival in Guangzhou, he and the local governor settled into an impasse: each refused to receive the other’s letters on the basis that it would be demeaning to treat with a figure of such low station. Napier, whom the local authorities had, by this point, christened with a Chinese name translating as “Laboriously Vile,” took to posting belligerent broadsheets around Guangzhou using the services of a local translator. Fate finally solved this vexing barbarian problem for the Chinese when both Napier and his translator contracted malarial fever and departed this world. Before expiring, however, Napier did note the existence of Hong Kong, a sparsely populated rocky outcropping that he assessed would provide an excellent natural harbor.

The Chinese could take satisfaction in having forced another round of rebellious barbarians into compliance. But it was the last time the British would accept rejection. With every year, British insistence grew more threatening. The French historian Alain Peyrefitte summed up the reaction in Britain in the aftermath of the Macartney mission: “If China remained closed, then the doors would have to be battered down.”
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All of China’s diplomatic maneuvers and abrupt rejections only delayed an inevitable reckoning with the modern international system, designed as it was along European and American lines. This reckoning would impose one of the most wrenching social, intellectual, and moral strains on Chinese society in its long history.

The ascendant Western industrial powers would clearly not abide for long a diplomatic mechanism that referred to them as “barbarians” presenting “tribute” or a tightly regulated seasonal trade at a single Chinese port city. For their part, the Chinese were willing to make limited concessions to Western merchants’ appetite for “profit” (a vaguely immoral concept in Confucian thought); but they were appalled by the Western envoys’ suggestions that China might be simply one state among many, or that it should have to live with permanent daily contact with barbarian envoys in the Chinese capital.

To the modern eye, none of the Western envoys’ initial proposals were particularly outrageous by the standards of the West: the goals of free trade, regular diplomatic contacts, and resident embassies offend few contemporary sensibilities and are treated as a standard way to conduct diplomacy. But the ultimate showdown occurred over one of the more shameful aspects of Western intrusion: the insistence on the unrestricted importation of opium into China.

In the mid-nineteenth century, opium was tolerated in Britain and banned in China, though consumed by an increasing number of Chinese. British India was the center of much of the world’s opium poppy growth, and British and American merchants, working in concert with Chinese smugglers, did a brisk business. Opium was, in fact, one of the few foreign products that made any headway in the Chinese market; Britain’s famed manufactures were dismissed as novelties or inferior to Chinese products. Polite Western opinion viewed the opium trade as an embarrassment. However, merchants were reluctant to forfeit the lucrative trade.

The Qing court debated legalizing opium and managing its sale; it ultimately decided to crack down and eradicate the trade altogether. In 1839, Beijing dispatched Lin Zexu, an official of considerable demonstrated skill, to shut down the trade in Guangzhou and force Western merchants to comply with the official ban. A traditional Confucian mandarin, Lin dealt with the problem as he would with any particularly stubborn barbarian issue: through a mixture of force and moral suasion. Upon arriving in Guangzhou, he demanded that the Western trade missions forfeit all of their opium chests for destruction. When that failed, he blockaded all of the foreigners—including those having nothing to do with the opium trade—in their factories, announcing that they would be released only on the surrender of their contraband.

Lin next dispatched a letter to Queen Victoria, praising, with what deference the traditional protocol allowed, the “politeness and submissiveness” of her predecessors in sending “tribute” to China. The crux of his missive was the demand that Queen Victoria take charge of the eradication of opium in Britain’s Indian territories: