The Embassy and the Canton System, episode 1

The Kneeling Question

In September 1793, at the emperor's summer retreat at Chengde, Lord Macartney, the first British ambassador ever sent to China, is told he must kneel three times and touch his head to the ground nine times before the Qianlong Emperor, and he refuses. The episode follows Macartney and the twelve year old page George Staunton, the only Briton in the party learning Chinese, from the government's instructions and the long voyage to the morning of the audience, and asks what Britain wanted and why a bow mattered so much to both sides. It leans heavily on the embassy's own British accounts; the court is heard only through a few of its orders about the envoys.

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Transcript

In September 1793, at the emperor's summer capital at Chengde, outside the Great Wall, a British ambassador named Lord Macartney was told what he must do when he came before the Qianlong Emperor. He would go down on his knees and put his head to the ground, the same prostrations the court expected from its own subjects and vassals, and from strangers too. In Chinese the act is called ketou, knocking the head, and English speakers came to call it the kowtow. Done in full, it meant kneeling three times, and at each kneeling touching the forehead to the floor three times, nine knocks of the head in all. The man pressing it on Macartney was Heshen. Heshen had risen from the palace guard to become the old emperor's favourite, the most powerful minister in the empire, and one of the richest men alive. Chengde was the Qing emperors' mountain retreat, a great park of lakes, palaces and temples in the hills northeast of Beijing, where they spent the summers hunting and receiving the princes of Mongolia and Tibet. Macartney had already put a proposal about the ceremony to the court in writing. Heshen denied ever having seen it, and insisted that the ambassador perform the full kowtow before the emperor. So there they were, two very formal men in a very formal place, deadlocked over how far one of them should bend. I want to take you back a little, to that written proposal, because it shows exactly what Macartney thought was at stake. At first Macartney had not even understood that he was expected to prostrate himself before the emperor. When it was made plain to him, he refused. He did not see the Qianlong Emperor as his king's master. He saw him as the king of England's equal, no more and no less. So he made the court an offer. Yuanmingyuan, the Garden of Perfect Brightness, was the emperors' great palace and pleasure ground on the edge of Beijing. Macartney said he would not try to avoid the ceremony of prostration at all. He would go through the whole of it, on one condition. The condition was that "a subject of his Imperial Majesty, of rank equal to his own, should perform, before the picture he had with him of his Majesty, dressed in his robes of state, the same ceremonies" that Macartney would perform before the Chinese throne. In other words, a Chinese official of Macartney's own rank would kneel and knock his head before a portrait of King George the Third, and then Macartney would do the same before the emperor. Bow for bow. Equal for equal. The British reasoning went like this. A subject owed homage to his own sovereign, but the envoy of a foreign power was something else, and there was a necessary distinction "between acts of homage and submission" and "the voluntary tokens of esteem and friendship." The acts of a man in a public office, the argument ran, were not so much his own as the acts of those he represented. The embassy even reached back to ancient Greece for a warning: an Athenian envoy named Timagoras, who had performed such an act before the king of Persia, and who was condemned to die when he got home, for degrading the nation that had sent him. Nobody expected Lord Macartney to be executed when he got back to London. But he knew that whatever he did on his knees, his king did on his knees. The offer had to go in writing, and it had to be translated into Chinese with complete accuracy, so that nothing could be lost through a mistake or a misrepresentation. That turned out to be its own small crisis. The embassy's interpreter was a native of China, but he was a stranger to the formal style the palace used, and after years in Naples writing Latin and Italian, he had lost the habit of writing Chinese characters. The court's escort, an official the British called the legate, wanted nothing less than the full ceremony with no conditions, and he would offer no help at all in putting a condition on paper. So Macartney pressed for permission to be visited by the European missionaries who worked for the court, men he knew were well disposed to the embassy, and who might get him a faithful translation. Catholic missionaries from Europe had served the emperors in Beijing for generations, as astronomers, painters, clockmakers and translators. Even they, though they understood the language, seldom tried to write an official paper themselves. They hired a Chinese scholar bred to letters to do it for them. And the missionaries could help in another way, since the embassy's own interpreter sometimes suffered from ill health, and the gentlemen of the embassy needed someone to speak for them in the common business of life. That was the offer. And at Chengde, with Heshen insisting on the full kowtow, Macartney would make it all over again. So the question hung over everything. Would the ambassador of King George put his forehead to the floor, or would he go home with nothing? Hold on to that standoff, because this whole episode climbs back up to it. Hello, and welcome to the first episode of a new season. I'm telling this season's story on the work of Stephen R. Platt, William T. Rowe and Hosea Ballou Morse, and on the words of men who were there, among them Sir George Staunton and John Barrow. This is the story of how Britain and China dealt with each other across four decades, from a British lord's arrival at the emperor's court to the eve of the crisis that would end in war. We will follow emperors and envoys, merchants and missionaries, and above all a boy you will meet in this episode, whose few words of Chinese would set the course of his whole life. Along the way we will meet a Canton merchant named Wu Bingjian, two emperors who inherit the old man's throne, and a missionary named Robert Morrison. The foreign traders called him Howqua, and so will we. But to understand why one man's knee mattered so much to two empires, we have to go back to London.

It starts with tea. By the late eighteenth century the British drank tea on a scale no other people in Europe could match, and almost every leaf of it came from China. Tea had gone from a luxury of the rich to the daily drink of ordinary working families, and the tax on it was a real part of the government's income. The only Westerners allowed to buy it were the merchants who came to a single Chinese port, Canton, in the far south. There, the trade ran on China's terms: through a handful of licensed Chinese firms, under Chinese officials, by Chinese rules, with foreigners confined to the waterfront for the trading season. How that system worked, and who it made rich, is a story of its own, and we will get to it. For now, all you need to know is that the British hated it. Among the aims set down for the embassy was to free the trade at Canton from "the restraints and extortions laid on and exercised by the officers at that port". But the larger goal was expansion: to open British trade into Chinese ports north of Canton. Behind that push stood industrialists in northern England, who were demanding new markets for their goods, and their pressure pushed the home secretary to go ahead. That home secretary was Henry Dundas, a Scottish politician who also oversaw the government's dealings with India. Now, you might think the East India Company, which ran the British side of the China trade, would be cheering all this on. The East India Company was a private corporation with a royal charter, which held a monopoly on British trade with China and by now governed large parts of India. In fact the Company was lukewarm about the embassy. It feared that an envoy might offend the emperor and put at risk the trade it already had. The decision to send an ambassador was made by the British government, not the Company. And there was a quieter purpose too. A secondary aim of the voyage was to gather naval intelligence along the Chinese coast. It is worth knowing, though, that the British of this time did not look down on China. In government and in trade alike, they shared a deep admiration for China's imperial system of governance. The man chosen to lead the embassy was George Macartney. Macartney was an Irishman of long experience: envoy to the court of Catherine the Great in Russia, governor of the island of Grenada in the Caribbean, and then governor of Madras in India. In Russia he had negotiated a commercial treaty. In Grenada he was captured when the French took the island. In Madras he governed through a war, quarrelled bitterly with the army, and afterwards fought a duel in London and was wounded. He was, in short, a man used to dealing with powerful rulers, prickly colleagues and long voyages. He was not a man used to backing down. On his appointment as ambassador to China, on May 3, 1792, he was sworn of the Privy Council, the circle of the king's own advisers. His title was Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, and it came with a salary of ten thousand pounds a year. Plenipotentiary simply means that he carried full power to negotiate in the king's name. Macartney's own view was that the emperor and his ministers had to be impressed by a display of pomp and dignity. So the embassy was built to impress. The Admiralty sent a warship, HMS Lion, of sixty four guns, under Captain Sir Erasmus Gower. The Lion carried four hundred passengers and crew. Alongside her sailed a Company ship, the Hindostan, which carried most of the six hundred crates and packages of gifts for the emperor. The presents entrusted to the ambassador had cost thirteen thousand one hundred and twenty four pounds. They were not trinkets. Macartney hoped that the finest machines and instruments Britain could make would gently impress upon the emperor the power of British civilization. The prize among them was a gigantic planetarium, a working model of the heavens, which had taken thirty years to build. There were scientists on board to show it all off. One of them, James Dinwiddie, resolved that he would make his very first ascent in a balloon in Beijing. Dinwiddie was a Scottish lecturer in science, and his job was to set up and demonstrate the instruments. There were telescopes, air pumps, globes, model ships, fine porcelain from Wedgwood and the best cloth from British mills, along with the planetarium and the clocks. The message was simple. Look what we can make. Wouldn't you like to buy some? I will leave it to you to decide whether making your first balloon flight over the capital of China is brave or merely optimistic. And behind all of it sat one more grievance, an old and bitter one. Macartney was to seek an edict preventing in future "the demand that an innocent man should be delivered up as a substitute to suffer the punishment due to a criminal who may have found means to escape". In 1784 a gun fired in salute from a British ship near Canton killed two Chinese men, and the British gave up the gunner, who was put to death. The memory of it still burned at Canton. So the embassy carried trade, pride, science and grievance all at once. What it carried most of all was a list.

That list came from Henry Dundas, in the form of written instructions to Macartney, and if you want to know what Britain wanted from China, this is where to look. The case began with tea. Government measures on the tea trade, Dundas wrote, had more than trebled the legal importation of tea into Great Britain. In 1784 Parliament had slashed the tax on tea, smuggled tea lost its price advantage, and the legal trade boomed. That made it, in his words, particularly desirable to cultivate China's friendship. The Company's purchases in China for Europe now required no less than one million four hundred thousand pounds a year. Here is a detail I enjoy. When Dundas told Macartney how to describe all this tea to the emperor, he never named it. Macartney was to tell the emperor that Britain bought "to the amount of twenty millions of pounds weight of a Chinese herb", a herb, Dundas added, that would find little sale anywhere else. And Britain paid for it, Dundas admitted, partly in woollens and cottons and other goods, but a considerable part was paid to China in bullion. Bullion here means silver, mostly Spanish silver dollars minted in the Americas, which flowed into China year after year to pay for the tea. Keep an eye on that silver. Which way it flows is one of the great stories of this season. Then came the complaints. The Company's supercargoes, Dundas wrote, were denied open access to the courts of the country and the equal execution of its laws. A supercargo was a merchant who sailed with a cargo to buy and sell it, and at Canton the Company's supercargoes ran its whole business. Earlier appeals against these evils had failed, Dundas said, through the intrigues of Chinese officials and merchants at Canton. So it would be among the chief objects of the mission to obtain a remedy for them, and since the Canton officials could not be relied on, an embassy would go to the emperor himself, in the name of the King of Great Britain. Then the asks, and they were large. Macartney was to seek a grant of a small tract of ground or a detached island, in a more convenient situation than Canton. There the British would hold the power of policing and exercising jurisdiction over their own people. At the same time he was to insist that Britain's aims were purely commercial, without even a wish for territory. You may notice a certain tension between asking for an island and promising you want no territory. I don't think anyone in London lost sleep over it. And if the embassy ended on friendly terms, he might propose that the emperor receive a British minister at his court, occasionally or permanently. In Europe, permanent ambassadors at each other's courts were the normal machinery of diplomacy. China had never received one. Then there is one line in these instructions that deserves a pause. If the emperor demanded that Britain send no more opium to China, Macartney was to agree, rather than risk any essential benefit by fighting for the liberty to sell it. Opium, grown under the Company's control in India, was already finding its way into China, though the emperors had banned its sale for smoking. Opium is a drug made from the dried sap of the poppy. Smoked, it brings a deep, dreamy calm, and it is ferociously addictive. For now it was a small line in a long document. By the end of this season it will be the whole story. Dundas had ideas about method too. Despotic princes, he wrote, "are frequently more easy of access than their Ministers and Dependants," so if the emperor grew curious and friendly, Macartney should turn it to advantage. He was to tell the emperor that King George wished to send an embassy "to the most civilized as well as most ancient and populous nation in the world". He should praise the voyages of discovery made under the king's own patronage for the gaining and spreading of knowledge, and express the high esteem the king felt for the emperor's wisdom and virtue. Those voyages were above all Captain Cook's, which had mapped the Pacific in the king's name and made his reign famous across Europe. And if the old emperor had died by the time Macartney arrived, the same compliment could be paid to the prince who succeeded him, who, London understood, had already been managing public affairs for some time. On the road, Macartney might find a Portuguese, Spanish or Italian missionary, or some other intelligent person free from national attachment or prejudices, who could be useful in his service. If he approached Beijing by sea, he might send one of the Lion's lieutenants, or an officer of his guard in the king's uniform, with the messengers announcing his arrival on the coast. He would have a military guard of chosen men from the Light Dragoons, the infantry and the artillery. The guard, Dundas wrote, "will add splendor and procure respect to the Embassy," and if the emperor fancied copying their drill, he might owe Britain a favour in return. The Company's directors shipped a great variety of British goods, not for sale, but to be handed out to excite a taste for them. Free samples, in other words. Because the emperor was very old and his death had been expected for some time, the embassy carried a second letter, addressed to whoever was emperor when it arrived. And the king granted dormant credentials as minister plenipotentiary to Sir George, the embassy's secretary, so that he could take over if Macartney died or left. Dormant meant they lay unused unless they were needed. So here is the list, as Macartney carried it: a remedy for the abuses at Canton, trade at new ports to the north, an island of Britain's own under British law, and a British minister living at the emperor's court. Any one of those would have changed how China dealt with the West. Macartney was meant to come home with all of them. After all that detail, Dundas left the ambassador a great deal of room. Macartney was not to be hampered by precise instructions. And on ceremony, the very question that would trap him at Chengde, the instructions were clear in their own way. Macartney was to conform to the ceremonies of the court, so long as they did not compromise the honour of his sovereign or lower his own dignity. Then Dundas added a line that reads very differently once you know what was coming. He was sure, he wrote, that Macartney would be "too prudent and considerate to let any trifling punctilio stand in the way of the important benefits" the emperor's goodwill might bring. A punctilio is a fine point of etiquette. London thought the ceremony would be a trifle. It would prove to be nothing of the kind.

Macartney would carry one more document, a letter from King George the Third to the Qianlong Emperor. Presenting it, with the king's good wishes, was the official reason for the whole mission. George the Third had been king since 1760, and only a decade before he had lost the American colonies. The letter was written as one monarch to another, and in places it reads almost as a friendly invitation. The king explained that his voyages of discovery around the world had been made "not for the purpose of conquest, or of enlarging Our dominions which are already sufficiently extensive for all Our wishes". And now, being at peace with all the world, he said, no time could be better for extending the bounds of friendship. He offered, in exchange for learning about China's celebrated institutions, "a full and free communication of any art, science, or observation" the Europeans had discovered. Then the requests, put gently. The king asked that British subjects on China's coasts be allowed a secure residence there and a fair access to China's markets, "under such laws and regulations, as Your Majesty shall think right". He proposed that a proper person, authorized by the king, should live in China to regulate the conduct of British subjects and to receive complaints against them. He asked that one man "shall not suffer for the crime of another, in which he did not participate," and he promised that British subjects who broke China's laws would be seized and punished. He introduced Sir George as the embassy's secretary and as minister plenipotentiary in case of Macartney's death or absence, a man who had served as attorney general in the West Indies and had treated for peace with one of the greatest princes of India. And he closed with the line that tells you exactly how he saw the man he was writing to. "As We are Brethren in Sovereignty, so may a Brotherly affection ever subsist between Us." He signed it, in Latin, as the emperor's good brother and friend. Brethren in sovereignty. Two kings, two equals, writing as brothers. In the Qing court's view of the world, there was only one Son of Heaven, and every other ruler stood below him; foreign kings sent tribute, they did not send brotherly letters. Macartney was carrying the word brother to a court that did not have a place to put it.

One of the hardest obstacles to the whole mission turned out to be language. The embassy was going to the court of China, and as far as anyone could tell, nobody in Britain could speak Chinese. The job of finding interpreters fell to Sir George, the embassy's secretary. Sir George was an Irish physician turned colonial official, Macartney's friend and most trusted deputy through years of service in the Caribbean and in India. He also saw in the embassy a fine chance to improve the education of his son, also named George, who was eleven years old. Sir George kept the boy out of ordinary schools, hired him private tutors, took him to scientific lectures, and forbade him to read fairy tales. That boy matters. He is going to be one of the threads we follow through this entire season. Father and son crossed the Channel in the wet chill of January 1792, to look first in Paris. Paris had a long tradition of French missionaries to China, and it seemed the obvious place to start. They found one old missionary who had been to China, and he was not disposed to visit that distant country again, on any terms. So they went on to Italy, long a base for the Jesuit missions to China. But in Rome they found that the Vatican had not employed any Chinese scholars in a very long time. It was the British ambassador at Naples who pointed them to the right place, a Catholic college with Chinese students. The college had been founded decades earlier by an Italian priest who had worked at the court of an earlier Qing emperor, to train Chinese converts as missionaries to their own country. Its students came to Italy as boys, learned Latin and Italian and theology, and were ordained as priests before they sailed home. There Sir George engaged two of the college's Chinese students to come with the embassy as interpreters. They were taking a real risk. Qing law treated subjects who left the empire without permission as criminals, and a Chinese priest trained abroad could expect trouble at home. And so the two men who would carry the words of the King of England to the Emperor of China were a pair of Chinese students, trained as missionaries, found in an Italian college. The boy now had teachers, and the embassy had a voice. A thin one, but a voice.

The embassy left Portsmouth on September 26, 1792. With its military escort it numbered ninety five people. There were diplomats and secretaries, soldiers of the guard, scientists, painters, musicians, gardeners and servants, and one boy. The route ran south through the Atlantic by way of Madeira and Rio de Janeiro, round the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean to Java, and then north through the South China Sea. The Lion and the Hindostan would be ten months at sea. That is a long time on a sailing ship, and it was not a gentle voyage. One of the two interpreters, Mr. Li, meant to avoid censure in China by passing himself off as a foreigner, and he dressed as a European. They stopped at a remote island in the southern Indian Ocean, where they found two Americans and three Frenchmen who had already managed to bludgeon and skin eight thousand seals. It is a reminder that the British were far from the only people out in the world looking for something to sell. Deaths mounted as they sailed. First the Hindostan's cook died, and the next day Macartney's carpenter was killed by local people while washing linen on shore. On April 1 they reached the island where Charles Cathcart was buried. Cathcart had led Britain's first attempt at an embassy to China, sent out in 1787, and he died on the voyage the following year, so his embassy died with him. Macartney and Captain Gower went to see the grave of the man whose mission they were now attempting. It is hard to imagine a more pointed start. The other interpreter had a change of heart. He feared being arrested by the Qing government for having gone abroad, and he refused to go on. That left the embassy with a single interpreter, the one dressed as a European, and he would later find the palace's formal style beyond him. Then came good news. Sir George learned that the emperor had responded favourably to Britain's proposal to send an embassy. The ships first touched Chinese territory at a group of islands near Macau on June 20, 1793. Macau was a small Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Pearl River, below Canton, where the foreign merchants lived when they were not trading. But the embassy was not stopping in the south. It was heading north, toward the capital.

As they sailed north up the coast, Macartney urged every one of his people to behave well. Their conduct in China, he told them, would determine how their countrymen would be treated there in the future. The coast itself was new to them, and so, finding capes without names they knew, they went ahead and named them after themselves: a Cape Gower, a Cape Macartney. I like to think the capes were unbothered. Meanwhile more than a hundred men were on the Lion's sick list. And Macartney, thinking ahead to the court, pressured the captain of the Hindostan into selling him several watches he had brought along, to give as presents. Hang on to those watches. This was a coast the British barely knew, and they were learning it as they went. The ambassador reached Zhoushan on July 3, and on July 25 he was off Dagu. Zhoushan is an island group off the central coast. Dagu sat at the mouth of the river up to Tianjin, the river port that served Beijing, and from there the embassy would travel inland by boat and by road. Captain Gower was ordered to take the ships back to wait at Zhoushan. The welcome was overwhelming. The emperor's gifts of provisions alone included twenty bulls, one hundred sheep, one hundred pigs and a thousand fowls. Macartney, charmed, reached for Shakespeare: "Oh, brave new world that has such people in it!" It is Miranda's line in The Tempest, spoken by a girl who has never seen the wider world. And from the emperor downwards, Macartney was received by everyone he met with every mark of respect, honour and courtesy, with one exception: the legate, the court's escort. There was a catch to the welcome, though. From the moment he landed until he reached Canton months later, Macartney was cut off from all communication with the outside world. The British moved from their own ships into Chinese river boats and land carriages, and on the flags that flew from them, someone had written something in large Chinese characters. The words called Macartney an ambassador bearing tribute from the country of England. A tribute mission, in the Qing court's language, was a vassal ruler's envoy coming to pay homage to the emperor. Envoys from Korea, Siam or the Ryukyu Islands came on fixed schedules, performed the kowtow, presented the products of their countries, and went home with imperial gifts that were often worth more than what they brought. So there it was, flying over his head. Everything Macartney had come to deny, written on his own boats. And he chose not to make a fuss. Since it was possible no one had told him what the characters meant, he "did not think himself bound to make a formal complaint about them". His reasoning was cold and practical. If he complained and the court refused to change the flags, which he thought quite possible, his mission would have come to an abrupt and unsuccessful end before it began. But he also knew what the flags meant for the moment that really counted. Those words would be noticed. They would be repeated in the court gazette and recorded in the annals of the empire, and through the Russians and the missionaries living in Beijing, they would find their way to Europe. So Macartney had to be all the more careful about anything he did himself, lest it be read as unworthy of the king he represented. He knew some history, too. A Russian ambassador in an earlier reign had refused the usual Chinese ceremony until a formal pact was made that a Chinese envoy would do the same before his own sovereign. That Russian, the British believed, was the only minister who had ever gained any point in negotiations with the Chinese court. The Dutch, by contrast, had submitted at once to every ceremony in the hope of rich rewards, and complained afterwards of being treated with neglect and sent away without the smallest promise of any favour. It was said that some missionaries had pointed out Holland to the court as a spot on the map, carrying a political weight proportioned only to its size. And there it is, Macartney's fear in a single image. If he bowed too easily, England might be measured the same way, as a small spot on the map. In the British reading, how far an envoy would bend before the throne served the court as a scale for judging how much his country mattered. And now the legate began to press him, as he had hinted before, to practise the prostrations in his presence, ready for the throne. Macartney was not unprepared. He was well aware how tenaciously the Chinese court insisted on its ceremonies. But the boats carried on up the river, and the banners went on flying.

So far we have seen all this through British eyes. Let me turn it around, because the court had its own view of what was arriving. The Qianlong Emperor was eighty two years old in 1793, and he had ruled China since 1735, longer than almost any emperor in its history. He was a poet of tireless output, a collector of art on an imperial scale, and a soldier by proxy, who styled himself the Old Man of the Ten Complete Victories after the wars fought in his name. Every step of a foreign embassy's progress was reported to him by the officials along its route, and he answered in the margins of their reports in vermilion ink, a colour only the emperor could use. His armies had carried Qing rule deep into Central Asia, and he saw himself, with some reason, as the ruler of the greatest state on earth. The Qing dynasty itself was Manchu, from a people beyond the Great Wall who had conquered China in 1644 and ruled it from Beijing ever since. The court received foreign envoys through an elaborate set of rites for guests, with the emperor at their centre and every visitor's place fixed below him. For a court like this, ritual was not decoration. It was how the order of the world was made visible, who stood where, and who bowed to whom. And the emperor tried to make the British perform that guest ritual in full. Seen from the throne, a king who sent an envoy across the oceans with gifts was doing exactly what kings beyond the empire had always done: acknowledging the emperor's virtue. So the court's problem was not that the British had come. The problem was that the British kept insisting on what their coming meant. Macartney, for his part, was trying to win an unspoken acknowledgment that he was the emissary of a sovereign of the seas, fully equal to Qianlong. Between August 21 and October 7, 1793, first at Beijing, then at the summer capital at Chengde, then at Beijing again, the two men circled each other, each trying to make the other dance to his own steps. The other tributary envoys at court, unlike Macartney, all readily performed the kowtow. So from Chengde, the British looked like the one guest who would not take his place. And the old man's patience with these proud guests ran thin. He issued an edict to his ministers of state expressing "great displeasure" with the British, and withdrew the extra favours they had been shown. He put his rule in a single line: "But if they come in arrogance, they get nothing." That was the emperor the British were about to meet.

In the end, somebody gave way. The full kowtow was set aside. It was agreed that Macartney would kneel on one knee, and the emperor would receive him. That was how a British subject knelt before his own king. The emperor would see him on September 14, nearly a week after the embassy reached Chengde. Before dawn on the appointed day, the ambassador was carried off in a palanquin in full regalia. Here is what Macartney himself wrote about that morning. They reached the court in a little more than an hour, the distance being about three miles from their lodging. They got down at the park gate and walked to the imperial encampment, and were led to a large handsome tent beside the emperor's own. They waited there for about an hour. Then drums and music announced the emperor's approach, and they came out onto the green carpet. The emperor came seated in an open palanquin carried by sixteen bearers, surrounded by officers bearing flags, standards and umbrellas. As he passed, the British knelt on one knee, while all the Chinese around them made their usual prostrations. Once the emperor had taken his throne, Macartney came to the entrance of the tent, "holding in both my hands a large gold box, enriched with diamonds," with the king's letter inside. "I walked deliberately up", he wrote, and climbing the steps of the throne, he delivered the letter into the emperor's own hands. The emperor passed it to a minister, who placed it on a cushion. That was the moment of the whole voyage. All those months at sea and all that arguing, for the few seconds it took to hand over a box. Then the gifts began. The emperor gave Macartney, as his first present to King George, a carved stone sceptre, a symbol of peace and prosperity, and said he hoped the two sovereigns would always live in good correspondence and amity. The sceptre is called a ruyi, which means as you wish, a curved ornament given as a token of good fortune. Macartney privately thought it did not appear in itself to be of any great value. Then the emperor gave Macartney a second sceptre, for himself, and graciously accepted from him a pair of beautiful enamelled watches set with diamonds. Yes, those watches. Then Sir George came forward, introduced as the minister plenipotentiary, knelt on one knee in the same way, presented the emperor with two elegant air guns, and received a sceptre of greenish stone much like Macartney's. The emperor did not seem in the slightest put out that the ritual had been changed. And then came the moment that belonged to the boy. Young George was twelve by now, and served in the embassy as a page. The emperor wanted to hear him speak Chinese. "He wanted I should speak some Chinese words to him," the boy wrote, "which I did, thanking him for his presents". The old emperor took a small embroidered purse from his own waist and gave it to the boy, as a token of his esteem. An old emperor charmed by an English boy and a few phrases of Chinese. For a moment the whole tangle of ritual seemed beside the point. But there are two catches, and they matter. The first is the letter. The Chinese translation of the king's letter had been made in a form that scarcely appeared to come from a sovereign who thought himself Qianlong's equal. Brethren in sovereignty, in other words, did not quite survive the journey into Chinese. The second is the kneeling itself, and here the sources disagree. On one side is Macartney, whose journal said that everyone bowed repeatedly to the emperor, "except ourselves." On the other side is the boy's own diary. Of the audience, he first wrote that "we went down upon one knee and bowed our heads down to the ground", and later the words to the ground were crossed out. And at the emperor's birthday banquet, the boy wrote that "we bent one knee and bowed down to the ground. We repeated this ceremony nine times with the other mandarins." A mandarin was the European name for an official of the Chinese state. So perhaps the British held their line on one knee, as Macartney said. Or perhaps, in the crush of a court where everyone else was on the ground, they went further than the ambassador ever admitted. Either way, Macartney had what he came for, or he thought he did. He had reached the emperor, handed over his king's letter, and stood his ground on the ceremony, at least in his own telling. And yet, for all the gifts and courtesies, the king's letter still waited for its answer. The island, the new ports, the minister in Beijing, all of it now rested with an emperor who had his own ideas about arrogant guests. Next time, the Qianlong Emperor gives his answer.

Sources

• Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635-1834, Volume II (1926), pp. 212-214, 214-216, 216-217, 217-219, 219-221, 222-224, 232-233, 233-234, 234-236, 236-237, 237-238, 238-240, 240-241, 241-243, 243-244, 244-246, 246-247, https://archive.org/details/chroniclesofeast0000hose_h7m0
• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume I: The Period of Conflict, 1834-1860 (1910), p. 62-63, https://archive.org/details/internationalrel01mors
• John Barrow, Travels in China (1804), p. 195-197, https://archive.org/details/b22012928
• Sir George Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, Volume II (1797), pp. 130-132, 135-137, https://archive.org/details/authenticaccount02stau
• Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age (2018), pp. 12-16, 16-18, 18-20, 20-21, 21-23, 23-24, 24-26, 26-27, 27-29, 31-32, 32-34, 34-36, 37-39, 160-162
• William T. Rowe, China's Last Empire: The Great Qing (2009), p. 145-147