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The Embassy and the Canton System, episode 2

No Need of Your Manufactures

The Qianlong Emperor, eighty two years old and on the throne for nearly sixty years, has to answer the British, and his answer to every request Macartney brings is no. The episode follows the emperor's verdict and Macartney's long overland journey south, and gives full airtime to the season's first great question: was the refusal the blindness of an empire that could not see the modern world coming, or the considered policy of a confident and well informed court. It hears the court in its own edicts alongside Macartney's account.

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Transcript

Saber that Lord George Macartney gave to Qianlong in 1793
Saber that Lord George Macartney gave to Qianlong in 1793. Gary Todd from Xinzheng, China, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, Lord Macartney, ambassador of King George the Third, reached the Qianlong Emperor at his summer capital at Chengde, in September 1793. Britain had sent him with ninety five people and six hundred crates and packages of gifts, to open British trade to Chinese ports north of Canton, the single southern port where it was confined. The tea trade was worth a fortune to Britain, and the British hated the terms on which it ran. Macartney's job was to change them by going over the heads of the officials at Canton, straight to the emperor. After a long standoff over the kowtow, the full prostration the court expected of every envoy, Macartney knelt on one knee instead, as had been agreed. He climbed the steps of the throne and put King George's letter, in a gold box enriched with diamonds, into the emperor's own hands, and the emperor did not seem in the slightest put out that the ritual had been changed. And young George, the twelve year old son of Sir George, thanked the emperor in Chinese, and was given a small embroidered purse from the emperor's own waist. It had gone, by the standards of the British, rather well. But in the business he had come for, Macartney had made no progress at all. He had come halfway around the world with a list of things Britain wanted from China, and so far the list had gone nowhere. This episode is about what happened when he did. It is the story of an answer, and that answer has been argued over ever since. At the end of September the court moved back from the summer capital to Beijing, and the British went ahead to meet the emperor on his way in. It was the custom, they were told, for all public officers to meet the emperor on the road, ten or twelve miles from the capital. So at about four o'clock in the morning on September 30, the British were all mounted and riding out to take their places. The road had been newly made for the emperor's return, rolled as level as a bowling green and watered to keep down the dust, with painted lanterns hung on poles along each side. They were brought into a kind of guard house for tea, and then took their station on a high bank beside the road. As far as the eye could reach, on both sides, stood several thousand great officers of state in their ceremonial robes, troops in their holiday dress, standard bearers, military bands and officers of the household. A blast of the trumpet announced the emperor. And as he approached, every one of those thousands fell to the ground, except a small knot of foreigners who bent one knee only. I would love to know what the thousands thought of the knot. The emperor came carried by eight men in a kind of sedan chair, followed by a clumsy state chariot on two wheels, without springs. Among Macartney's own gifts were fine English carriages, built with springs, so the British were in a position to notice. You can hear the salesman in that description. He bowed very graciously to the ambassador as he passed, and sent a message saying that, since he understood Macartney was not well, he should go straight back to Beijing rather than stopping at Yuanmingyuan as planned. Yuanmingyuan, you may remember, was the emperors' great palace and pleasure ground on the edge of Beijing. The morning was cold, and the British were eager to get home, so they galloped back with a troop of cavalry. And here is a small scene that tells you a lot about how the embassy was handled. Arriving under the walls of Beijing, the British turned their horses toward a different gate from the usual one, just to see a little more of the city. One of the officials assigned to keep them in sight saw them make the wrong turn and shouted with all his might. They pushed on through the gate anyway. They were pursued with such a hue and cry that they were glad to escape down a side street to their lodging, where they arrived with at least a hundred soldiers at their heels. They were guests. They were honoured guests. And they were not, under any circumstances, to wander off. Now, those gifts. The biggest of them, including the great planetarium, had been too large to carry over the mountains to Chengde. They had been set up in a grand hall of the palace just outside Beijing, ready for the emperor's return. The British had shipped them across the world to dazzle the emperor, to show him the power of British civilization in brass and glass and clockwork. On the first of October the emperor came to see them. He inspected the presents in the hall of audience, and examined them with minute attention. Through an interpreter he told the British that the accounts he had received of their good conduct at Yuanmingyuan gave him great pleasure, and that he had ordered a present for each of them, as proof of his entire satisfaction. So far, so gracious. But the British had hoped for more than satisfaction. They had hoped for wonder. When the emperor was shown the lenses and the telescope, he pronounced them good enough to amuse children, and left. Heshen, the chief minister, picked up the giant lens and used it to light his pipe, as a joke. It was a burning lens, a great glass built to focus sunlight into a point of heat fierce enough to melt metal, and it was one of the showpieces of the gift list. I think we can say the joke landed with the Chinese side of the room more than the British. And soon the missionaries who had been helping James Dinwiddie, the embassy's scientist, set up the instruments, stopped coming. They had been ordered to have no more contact with the embassy. So that seems to settle it. The old emperor looked at the finest machines Britain could make, and shrugged. Except that it does not quite settle it, because of what the emperor did when the British were not watching. In private, the Qianlong Emperor was deeply fascinated by Western inventions. He had a cherished collection of seventy intricate English clocks. The palace already held workshops where craftsmen, some of them European missionaries, built and repaired clocks and mechanical toys for the court. In the grounds of Yuanmingyuan itself stood a whole quarter of European style palaces, with fountains and formal gardens, designed for the emperor decades earlier by Jesuit missionaries. This was not a man who had never seen a Western machine. He had seen a great many, and he owned the best of them. And while Dinwiddie was setting up his instruments, the emperor had actually ordered the missionaries to watch closely what he was doing, so that they could copy his work once the British had gone. So in public, the emperor could not have cared less. In private, he wanted to know how it all worked. As for the gifts themselves, most of them were stored away in the palaces. Sixty seven years later, when British and French troops looted Yuanmingyuan during a later war, they found some of the embassy's gifts still there. But that is a story for a much later season. Hold on to that gap between the public face and the private one. It is going to matter a great deal by the end of this episode.

George Macartney, 1st Earl Macartney
George Macartney, 1st Earl Macartney. Lemuel Francis Abbott, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Macartney, meanwhile, had a problem. His audience was over, the court was back in Beijing, and nobody would talk business with him. The court's idea was that an embassy came, presented its gifts, received the emperor's favour, and went home. Negotiation was not part of the ritual. The Qing court had no foreign ministry at all. Envoys from overseas were handled by the Board of Rites, the same office that ran the court's ceremonies, as a matter of ritual rather than of business. So the thing Macartney had come to do, sit across a table and trade concessions, had nowhere to happen. It was only by sheer persistence, after his return to Beijing, that Macartney managed to hand in a note setting out briefly the main points he wanted to negotiate. He never once had the chance to raise any of it with the emperor himself. Macartney had hoped to stay in Beijing through the winter and negotiate at leisure. The court expected an embassy to leave once its ceremonies were done. So he was negotiating against a clock he could not see, with a counterpart who did not believe there was anything to negotiate. That note is the bargain he came for, so let me give it to you plainly. The first request was to let English merchants trade at Zhoushan, at Ningbo and at Tianjin, three places on the coast north of Canton. Zhoushan was the island group off the central coast where the British ships had stopped on the way up. Ningbo was a major port on the mainland facing it, and Tianjin was the river port of Beijing itself. The second was to let them have a warehouse at Beijing for the sale of their goods, as the Russians had once had. Russia was the one European power with a treaty with the Qing, first signed in 1689 to settle the long frontier between them, and for a time Russian trade caravans had come all the way to the capital. Beyond that, Macartney asked for an island on the coast that the British could use as a depot to store their goods, and for privileged and protected terms of trade at Canton. And he asked that British merchants pay no more in duties than the emperor's own tariff allowed. And behind all of it stood the request in King George's own letter, for a man authorized by the king to live in China and look after his subjects there. Now here is the timing, and it is almost painful. On October 3, Macartney received an edict, on imperial yellow silk, from the emperor. An edict was a written command from the emperor, and yellow was the imperial colour, reserved for the emperor alone. That edict, as it turned out, rejected all of the British requests. But Macartney could not read it at the time, and he did not understand the rejection it contained. So he remained hopeful. That same day, he pressed for a letter of his own to be given to the emperor, listing his requests even more boldly than before. It was translated into Chinese by the embassy's interpreter, and copied out by little George. Think about that for a moment. The ambassador of the King of Great Britain was making his great bid for the China trade in a letter written out in the hand of a boy. The boy who had charmed the emperor at Chengde was now, quite literally, the hand of British diplomacy. And, because nobody could read the edict, he was making it after the answer had already been given. That list was a modest charter of rights for English trade. It was put forward politely in 1793, and it would be won by force of arms in 1842. 1842 is the year Britain imposed the first treaty of the Opium War on China, which opened new ports, ceded an island, and fixed the tariffs. So everything Macartney asked for politely, Britain would one day take at gunpoint. But that is a long way down the road from here.

Here is the emperor's answer, and I want to give it to you in his own words, because it is one of the most quoted documents in the history of China and the West. It came in two edicts addressed to King George the Third. They were written in Chinese, with Latin versions made by the European missionaries at court, which the British then put into English. So by the time the emperor's words reached the king, they had passed through three languages and at least two sets of hands. Keep that in mind too. In the first, the emperor took up the request in the king's own letter, for a British minister to live at his court. That, he said, was "not consistent with the Customs of this our Empire, and cannot therefore be allowed." Trade was in fine hands already, said the emperor, and there was no need to change more than a century of precedent just to please one country. He reminded the king that he had already given the embassy an abundance of gifts, and that the British should simply be grateful and go home. As for the British presents, on which so much money had been spent and over which Macartney had fretted for the whole voyage, the emperor said he had accepted them not because he wanted them, but merely as "Tokens of your own affectionate Regard for me." Then he went on. The greatness and splendour of his empire, he said, had spread its fame far and wide, so that foreign nations "from a thousand Parts of the World" crowded in over mountains and seas to pay homage and bring their rarest and most precious offerings. So, he asked, "what is it that we can want here?" And then the lines that would sting the British for a generation. "Strange and costly objects do not interest me." "We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures." Remember the planetarium. Remember the man lighting his pipe with the burning lens. The emperor's second edict answered Macartney's own letter, the one young George had copied out, and it was blunter still. It was delivered to the ambassador on October 7, the day he left Beijing. Its central point was simple. Britain had no leverage at all. "The products of our empire are abundant," the emperor wrote to King George, "and there is nothing we do not have." So China had never needed trade with foreign countries to give it anything it lacked. Tea, porcelain and silk, he went on, were "essential needs" for countries like England that did not have them. And so, out of grace, the dynasty had long allowed foreign merchants to come to Canton to buy them, "to satisfy your needs and to allow you to benefit from our surplus." Trade, in other words, was a favour, and it had always been a favour, and the favour ran entirely one way. England, he reminded the king, was only one of many countries that came to trade at Canton. "It being our constant Maxim to treat them all equally well, without any Partiality." If he gave Britain special treatment, he would have to give it to all the others as well. Notice what kind of argument that is. It is not about clocks or planetariums at all. It is about precedent, and about not letting any one foreign power stand above the rest. And the British proposals, he said, had "a Tendency to alter that whole system of European Commerce, so long established here, I cannot therefore assent to them." Then he went through Macartney's requests one at a time, and explained why each was impossible. New ports in the north? There were no warehouses prepared for that trade there, and no interpreters to handle it. If British ships turned up at Ningbo, at Zhoushan or at Tianjin anyway, the emperor would have no choice but to order his officials to force them to leave. A warehouse in Beijing? Foreign nations had never been given a place to trade in the capital. The Russians had indeed once traded in Beijing. But that privilege had been withdrawn from them long ago, and a market opened for them at Kyakhta, on the northern frontier. Kyakhta sat on the border between Mongolia and Siberia, and there Russian furs were traded for Chinese tea and cloth, far from the capital. An island? Macartney had asked for a small island at Zhoushan to be given to the English merchants to settle and trade, and that was refused too. No island, or even an inlet, of the empire could be given to any nation. As for duties, no more would be asked of the British than what was due, and no less would be taken. At Canton the official duties were in fact modest. What the British resented were the fees and presents piled on top of them at every step. Then came a refusal of something the British had not asked for. The emperor wrote that the ambassador seemed to have in mind spreading the English religion, "which is a Thing I will by no means permit." Religion appeared nowhere on Macartney's list. The court had banned Christian preaching in China decades earlier, while still keeping European priests in Beijing for their skills. And the emperor gave King George a way out, of a sort. He wrote that he could not persuade himself the requests came from the king himself; "they appear, O King, to have originated from the Ambassador himself." He did not propose to punish the king for his naivety in asking, and he allowed that Macartney might well have acted without the king's permission. Instead, he expressed his sympathy for remote England, whose people were so unfortunate as to live far away, beyond a vast waste, ignorant of the civilization of China. It is, if you like, the most polite possible way of saying: your man has overstepped, and you live a very long way from anywhere that matters. He took away none of Britain's existing privileges at Canton. But he refused every new one. That is the verdict. Every request, no. All those crates, all those months at sea, and a reply that thanked his king for his affectionate regard and told his merchants to stay in Canton. Now, why? Here the sources disagree, and this is one disagreement worth taking slowly, because it shapes how we see everything that follows, right down to the war that ends this story. The first answer is the one Britain told itself for a century and more. On this reading, the edict is exactly what it sounds like: the voice of a proud, closed empire that had looked the modern world in the face and could not see it. An emperor who called the embassy's lenses good enough to amuse children, and pitied England as remote and unfortunate, was, on this view, a man who did not know what he was dealing with. And the people who might have known better had their own reasons to keep things as they were. There was a dominating party at court for whom it was obvious that the Hoppo, the emperor's customs chief at Canton, with all his control and all his methods, must be kept in place at all costs. The Canton customs fed money straight into the emperor's private purse, and a great many officials did very well out of the system as it stood. So on this first reading, the refusal was blindness, protected by self interest. A sleeping giant, rolling over. The second answer is very different. On this reading, the famous words about having no use for British manufactures are boilerplate, the standard language of imperial edicts, and reading them literally has wrongly painted the Chinese as scornful of anything foreign. And we have already seen the evidence for it. An emperor with seventy English clocks, who had the missionaries watch the British scientist so they could copy his work, was not uninterested in Western things. What he would not do was say so, in a document to a foreign king who wanted something from him. Read that way, the edict is not ignorance at all. It is policy, and fairly clear policy at that. Think about it from the throne. A foreign king writes to ask for an island, a foothold in the capital, new ports along the coast and his own man living at court. Every one of those requests, granted to one power, would be demanded by the next. And in India, British trading posts had already grown into an empire. Treat every foreign nation alike, so that none can claim a special place. Keep the foreigners trading at Canton, and give up no island, not even an inlet. And never let trade look like anything but a favour from the throne. And the court was not as ill informed as the language suggests. Only the year before, Qing armies fighting the Gurkhas in the Himalayas had learned of a powerful foreign people ruling in Bengal, just beyond the mountains. Behind the scenes, the emperor ordered the coastal provinces to be on their guard, in case the disappointed British made trouble on their way home. That is not the behaviour of a man who thinks the visitors are harmless. It is the behaviour of a man who thinks they might be dangerous, and has decided that the safest answer is a firm, polite and total no. And the Qing knew better than most how outsiders could take China. Their own Manchu ancestors had ridden in from beyond the Great Wall and done exactly that. So which is it? Blindness or policy? Put the two side by side. On the first reading, the emperor did not understand what Britain was. On the second, he understood well enough, and refused anyway, because giving way to one demanding foreigner would only invite the next. One reading makes the court blind. The other makes it cautious, perhaps too cautious, but in control of what it was doing. I do not think you have to choose all the way. The court could be well informed about the British and still badly misjudge what an industrial nation would do with its frustration. What is clear is this. The man who wrote these edicts was not a fool, and the men who read them in London would spend generations treating him as if he had been one. And Macartney? For now, he did not know he had already lost.

A canal sluice with river vessels, a drawing by William Alexander, the embassy's draughtsman
A canal sluice with river vessels, a drawing by William Alexander, the embassy's draughtsman. William Alexander, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On October 7, the day the second edict was delivered, Macartney left Beijing. The order for the embassy to go came together with the edict. He received the emperor's final answer on his way out of the capital. It was a polite eviction, but an eviction all the same. The embassy did not leave empty handed, at least in the literal sense. It carried the emperor's own gifts for King George, silks and porcelain and jade, as a sovereign's gifts to a loyal and distant vassal. Which was, of course, exactly the problem. Ahead of him lay a journey of two months, inland, along canals and rivers and over mountain passes, all the way south to Canton. Back in 1759, a British interpreter had made the same slow passage. The British were escorted at first by Songyun, a senior Mongol official of the court, who was charged with seeing them safely south. On the way, Songyun showed Macartney a letter. It directed him to put the embassy under the care of the new viceroy of Canton, who was soon to set out for that city, and to take them there. A viceroy, as the British called him, was a governor general, who usually ruled over two provinces at once. This one had charge of the two southern provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, with Canton as his seat. The new viceroy had just been promoted from governor of the coastal province of Zhejiang. His name was Changlin. So Macartney travelled south in company with the new viceroy, and it was plainly intended that every honour should still be paid to him. Macartney spent long hours on the road talking with Songyun, and came to think highly of him, as an intelligent and straightforward man. Somewhere on the road out of Beijing, it had finally dawned on the British that their mission was not a success. The court had refused the British everything. It had no intention of insulting them on the way out. The first great stretch of the journey was by the Grand Canal. The Grand Canal was the longest artificial waterway in the world, more than a thousand years old, carrying the grain of the south to feed Beijing over a distance of more than a thousand miles. It ran through some of the richest and most crowded country in the world. The canal carried the British south across the Yellow River and the Yangzi to Hangzhou. From there the road would run up the rivers of Jiangxi, over a high pass through the mountains, and down the North River to Canton. The embassy's young draughtsman, William Alexander, sketched constantly along the way, and his pictures of canal boats, pagodas and officials would shape how Britons imagined China for a generation. Macartney, for his part, kept a journal, and he filled it with notes on the farming, the boats, the towns, the officials and the soldiers. And Macartney, who had come to dazzle China, now had time to study it. He was looking at China the way a British official looked at any great power: what was it worth, and how strong was it? His answer, on the military side at least, was startling. The soldiers he saw along the way were still armed largely with bows, swords and old matchlock muskets. The coastal war junks were built for chasing pirates, not for fighting a European navy. He mused that a couple of English frigates would be an over-match for the whole naval force of the empire. A frigate was a fast, medium sized warship, the workhorse of the Royal Navy, far smaller than a ship like the Lion. But Macartney also saw that if Britain showed any aggression, the emperor could simply shut down the trade. So he concluded that any such use of force was too wild to be seriously mentioned. Too wild to be seriously mentioned. In 1793. Forty seven years later, Britain would send a fleet. Macartney would later sum up his view of the empire in an image that stuck. China, he wrote, was like an old warship, still impressive, kept afloat for a century and a half by a line of able commanders, which might drift to pieces under a weaker one. It was a warning, not a prophecy, but a lot of people in Britain would come to read it as one. But notice what the ambassador did not say. He did not say China was weak, or foolish, or finished. He said that its strength depended on the men at the top. That is a very different thing, and it is worth remembering as this season goes on and the men at the top change.

At Hangzhou, Macartney met the viceroy properly. Hangzhou was a great old city at the southern end of the Grand Canal, once the capital of an earlier dynasty. The viceroy came at once to visit the ambassador on his boat, and Macartney liked him immediately. "He is perfectly well bred," Macartney wrote, "and the whole of his manner candid and gentleman-like." The viceroy confirmed everything Songyun had said about business. In particular, he spoke of the emperor's instructions to him to pay the greatest regard to the English at Canton, who were to have free access to him, in person or by letter. That was not nothing. London's own instructions had complained that the Company's men at Canton were denied open access to the courts of the country. Here at Hangzhou the embassy split. Some of its people went to join the ships at Zhoushan, and the rest went on overland with Macartney. The captain of the Hindostan had hoped to trade at Ningbo or Zhoushan. Macartney let that wish go with good grace, because the viceroy repeated his assurance that the Hindostan would be exempted from paying measurage and duties at Canton. Measurage was the fee charged on every foreign ship at Canton according to its measured size, the first and biggest of the charges a ship paid to trade there. So the embassy's one concrete gain so far was a tax break for a single ship. It was something. The next day the viceroy visited again, and repeated, in still stronger terms, his assurances of the emperor's favour and of his own goodwill toward the British. And Macartney noted, a few days later, that the viceroy "improves upon us every time we see him." After months of being watched, managed and steered by officials, Macartney had finally found one he felt he could talk to. They went on together, south and west, and the viceroy began, of his own accord, to talk about the trade. He asked Macartney to explain the main points on which he wanted his help once they reached Canton. When Macartney had done so, the viceroy asked him to put it all in writing, so that he could read it at leisure and master the subject. He was determined, he said, "to do what was equitable and proper, to grant what was reasonable and to deny what was not so." He accepted that some change in the way the British were treated would be right, both for the sake of justice and for the reputation of his country. But the viceroy was honest about his limits too. He was a kinsman of the emperor, and his rank gave him strong ground to stand on. Yet he had "measures to keep and delicacies to observe". He knew he could expect resistance at Canton from those who had an interest in the very grievances the British suffered. Macartney then put a little pressure on him. He told the viceroy that he would already have written home to report the court as unfriendly, if not for the viceroy's assurances, and that he had softened his report because of them. So the matter now rested with the viceroy, Macartney told him. "It was from what he should do, not what I should write, that they would form a judgement." In other words: I have vouched for you to London. Do not make me a liar. As they crossed into the province of Jiangxi, they passed through tea plantations, and the viceroy allowed Macartney to dig up several living tea plants, with large balls of earth still around their roots. Macartney hoped he would be able to send them on to Bengal. Bengal was the heart of British India. If tea could be grown there, Britain would no longer have to buy every leaf of it from China. It would be more than half a century, and would take a good deal of quiet theft of plants and know how, before British tea gardens in India really began to compete with China. At the end of November the viceroy came for a long visit one evening, and told Macartney that he suspected great peculation among the public officers at Canton, and that the emperor was much defrauded of his revenue there. Peculation is an old word for embezzling public money. That might have been a frank admission between two men of the world. It might also have been a careful probe, to find out whether corruption at Canton was what the British were really complaining about. At the town of Nanxiong, the viceroy parted company, going ahead to prepare the ambassador's reception at Canton. Nanxiong lies just over the mountain pass from Jiangxi into Guangdong, the province of Canton. When he took his leave, he told Macartney that "he had written to the Emperor in such terms upon our subjects that he was persuaded we should leave China, not only without dissatisfaction, but with essential proofs." Essential proofs, of the emperor's favour, of better treatment, of something to show for it all. It is hard to know what Changlin meant by that, and perhaps he did not entirely know himself. But the court had already refused every new British request, and at Canton, as he had admitted himself, he could expect resistance. After all those months, all that money and an emperor's flat refusal, Macartney was going to have to settle for a promise from a viceroy. So the embassy crossed the mountains and came down the river toward Canton, where all the European merchants were required to do their trading. Canton was a vast, rich, walled city on the Pearl River, and the foreign merchants there were allowed only a narrow strip of waterfront outside its walls. The emperor had told the British to do their business there, and to be grateful. Because the real question was never only what the emperor would allow. It was what happened every day on that waterfront, between the foreign traders, the licensed Chinese merchants who dealt with them, and the officials who taxed them all. Next time, we go inside that port, and find out how the system the emperor would not change actually worked, who ran it, and who paid when it failed.

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