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The Embassy and the Canton System, episode 8

The Second Embassy

In 1816 Lord Amherst sails for Beijing to try again where Macartney failed, with George Staunton as his adviser and Robert Morrison as interpreter, and the Jiaqing court is determined this time to have the kowtow. The episode follows Amherst and Staunton through instructions that pull different ways, a fortnight of argument over the ritual and a night ride to the Summer Palace that ends with the embassy thrown out without an audience, and asks why it ended even worse than Macartney's. It hears the court in the emperor's own vermilion edict alongside the Company and the British government.

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Transcript

William Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst
William Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst. Arthur William Devis, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, rebels broke into the Forbidden City, and the Jiaqing Emperor told the whole empire in an edict that he took the blame on himself. At Canton the court arrested a linguist who worked for the British and sent him to the far northwestern frontier. And the emperor ordered a secret inquiry into George Staunton, the Englishman who read Chinese, a man who, the order said, "from a youth was artful as an Imposter". The Company's men at Canton reckoned the court had been in no mood for compliments from foreigners ever since the attempt on the emperor's life. So London, naturally, decided to send it an embassy. This is the story of that embassy, the second the British sent to the Qing court, and of how it ended even worse than the first. The first had been Lord Macartney's, in 1793, and Sir George had been part of that one too, as a boy. Macartney had brought the king's requests to Qianlong, and Qianlong had received him with every courtesy and refused every one of them. The man who would try again was William Amherst, Lord Amherst, a peer in his early forties who had served as Britain's envoy to the court of Sicily. He was a capable, courteous man, but he had never been to Asia. He had inherited his title from his uncle, Jeffery Amherst, the general who had taken Canada from the French half a century before. So he was a man of good family, good manners and no particular knowledge of where he was going, which is to say, a fairly typical ambassador of his day. Why send anyone at all? The immediate crisis behind the embassy had begun with the Doris, a British warship that seized an American merchant ship in 1814 and brought her into Macau as a prize, and the quarrel that followed. And there was Europe. Napoleon had been beaten at Waterloo in June 1815, and the war that had filled every British mind for twenty years was over. Britain came out of that war with the largest navy in the world and a new sense of what it could ask of other nations. The Company's directors wanted to make sure that France did not send a postwar embassy to China before Britain did. The deeper idea was simple. The trouble at Canton came from the officials there, so the embassy would go over their heads, explicitly conceived as a way around the local authorities, straight to the emperor. The directors assumed that the troubles at Canton were a purely local matter, and that the Jiaqing Emperor knew nothing about them. We know better. The emperor knew all about the trouble at Canton, and he had asked for an investigation into Sir George himself. Sir George, for his part, had long hoped to lead an embassy himself. He had been told privately that he was almost certain to be sent as the king's envoy. But the directors ruled that an embassy was intended to represent the king of England, not the merchants, and a Company man would not do. Forty years later he still remembered the mortification, and he thought himself "the victim of some unworthy intrigue." So when this embassy came, he went as one of its commissioners, not as its head. The commission was three men: Amherst, Sir George, and the embassy's secretary, Henry Ellis. Ellis was a young diplomat who had already served on a British mission to Persia. Ministers in London had their doubts about that, given how fastidious the Chinese court was, how little it thought of men of commerce, and the personal accusation the Chinese had made against Sir George. He noted for the record, on 28 June, that His Majesty's Ministers had included his name in the commission "with full knowledge of the attack that had been made against him". Lord Amherst embarked at Spithead on the frigate Alceste on 8 February 1816. He was told to avoid touching at Canton on his way north, and Sir George and the other Company men chosen for the embassy were to meet the ships at sea, in secret. The Lyra, one of the embassy's ships, found Sir George on 8 July, and the two parties joined on 10 July. In the Company's account of that rendezvous, an island makes its first appearance in the records: Hong Kong. Remember the name. The meeting did not start well. Sir George was so touchy about his rank that at first he refused even to speak to the ambassador, and would only deal with him through his secretary. Amherst solved it by raising him to the second rank in the embassy, ahead of the secretary, and Sir George insisted that it be put in writing. He wrote home to his mother about it with some pride: "You will perceive," he told her, "that I am established the Second, and eventually on the death or absence of Lord Amherst First of the Embassy." So that is the man at Amherst's elbow: his country's leading expert on China, prickly about his rank, and a man the emperor feared would cause trouble. Sir George persuaded Robert Morrison to come along as the lead Chinese interpreter, with three of his language students from the factory to assist him. He would be the embassy's voice in the arguments to come, and, as we will see, the lone dissenter when Sir George put the kowtow to the Company men. And one more old acquaintance came aboard: Thomas Manning, the Englishman who had made it to Lhasa and been sent away. Amherst worried that Manning's presence might anger the emperor, given that history. Manning agreed to dress like an Englishman for the occasion, though he still refused to shave off his beard. He was one of the handful of Englishmen anywhere who spoke some Chinese. Then a fast boat came out from Macau with a copy of an imperial edict. The emperor had accepted the embassy, and it was to proceed to Tianjin without delay. The court had agreed to receive them. Whatever happened next, nobody could say the British had not been invited. Tianjin was the port that served Beijing, on the Hai River near the sea, the same route Macartney had taken. The party itself was large: the three commissioners, secretaries, a physician who doubled as naturalist, an artist, the interpreters, servants and a guard. And it was going to the same court, under the son of the same emperor, with the same question waiting for it at the end of the road. So far, so good. Hold on to that feeling, because it is about the last good news this embassy gets.

Before we follow the ships north, let me read you Amherst's instructions, because the whole story turns on a single sentence in them. They came from the Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, the minister then steering Britain through the peace settlement in Europe. They began with why the embassy mattered at all: the China trade affected the interests and comforts of the inhabitants of the British Empire, and it was "connected with a large branch of the Public Revenue". The tea duty alone paid for a real slice of the British state. The Company's supercargoes at Canton had asked for a mission as the only remedy for their troubles, warning that "there is reason to apprehend the failure of the Commerce altogether." Castlereagh hoped that nothing would arise to make it necessary for Amherst to touch at Canton before he reached the capital. Among his objects was freedom from the intrusion of Chinese officers into the Company's factory, and the right to employ Chinese servants, the point Sir George had failed to win in 1814. Best of all, the instructions said, would be a resident British minister at Beijing; nothing would contribute more to the mission's objects. And Amherst was not to complain. It would be unadvisable, the instructions said, "in any degree to use the language of complaint." Amherst was to take on the full public character of His Majesty's ambassador and proceed with as much ceremony as could be admitted, "without causing a material delay, or incurring any unreasonable expence." Splendour, in other words, but on a budget. Then came the sentence on the kowtow. Amherst was to seek an audience as early as possible, "conforming to all the ceremonies of that Court, which may not commit the honour of your Sovereign or lessen your own dignity, so as to endanger the success of your Mission." Read that one slowly. Does it mean any ceremony that is not dishonourable, or any ceremony at all, so long as the mission succeeds? It can be read either way, and that was the trouble. The instructions added that Amherst would surely be "too prudent and considerate to let any trifling punctilio stand in the way" of winning the emperor's good opinion. At the same time, Amherst was to declare at the first opportunity that the Prince Regent had entirely approved of the ceremonies Lord Macartney performed before the present emperor's father, and had specially commanded him to follow that precedent. The Prince Regent was the king's son, ruling in his father's name since George the Third had sunk into madness. So, in one breath: kneel if you must, do whatever Macartney did, and do not let a trifle stop you. The trouble, as we will see, was that nobody could agree on what Macartney had done. Amherst was to tell the emperor that the Prince Regent, having taken up the royal authority because of the indisposition of his father, had long wanted to announce it, and that the pacification of Europe "had appeared to him to present a most auspicious occasion". He was carrying a letter from the Prince Regent to the emperor, which he was to ask the emperor's permission to deliver. Remember that letter. It was the formal heart of the embassy: without it, an audience would be an audience for nothing. He was also to be ready for two awkward subjects: the conduct of the captain of the Doris, and the war in Nepal. The British in India had been fighting the kingdom of Nepal, on Tibet's southern border, since 1814, and the Qing considered Nepal a tributary. Amherst was to represent it as "a War of aggression" on the part of Nepal. The government of Bengal, he was to say, had sought for years to settle matters amicably, the Rajah of Nepal had attacked British subjects, and if the Rajah had suffered by the contest, "it was an evil he had brought upon himself by his own violence and injustice." You can imagine how that would sound to a court that counted Nepal among the kingdoms that sent it tribute. On the Doris, he was simply referred to a separate letter from the Admiralty. Then the clause that would matter most. If Amherst and the other commissioners differed, he was "at liberty to act upon your own responsibility". And Ellis, the embassy's secretary, was given dormant credentials as minister plenipotentiary, to be used only on Amherst's death or absence. In other words, the government gave Amherst a lot of rope, and the final call. Whatever happened over the kowtow would be his decision, and his alone. And if it went wrong, there was no one above him to share the blame.

But Amherst carried a second set of advice, and it pulled the other way. The Company's directors had a small secret committee for matters too sensitive for the full board, and it wrote to him too. The Company was governed from East India House in the City of London by a court of twenty-four directors, elected by its shareholders. It explained why the Company thought an embassy expedient: because of what it called "the insolent, capricious, vexatious" proceedings of the local government at Canton towards the Company's representatives. It listed the grievances, among them the seizing, beating and imprisoning of the Chinese linguist who had been employed by the supercargoes, and even reporting him to the emperor as engaged in treason with them. The Canton government, the committee wrote, "appear to entertain a permanent wish to bring the British Factory wholly under their own control." And it reminded him what was at stake. The Company now sent from eighteen to twenty great ships to Canton every year, each the size of a sixty-four gun warship, and brought back about thirty million pounds of tea. A sixty-four was a ship of the line, a full warship of the battle fleet, so these were some of the largest merchant ships afloat. In the last thirty years, the committee wrote, the Company's trade had increased more than fourfold. It called the Qing a court that had shown "singular indisposition to diplomatic intercourse and free communication, especially with Europeans." What it wanted was the trade placed on steady and fixed principles, guarded from arbitrary power, which would obviously be, as it put it, "a very valuable acquisition". A resident at Beijing would preserve good understanding between the two governments and repress mal-administration at Canton. But the committee knew the history: a resident had been proposed by Lord Macartney, and positively refused in the old emperor's letter to the king. So as a fallback it suggested asking for an English consul at Canton, with the consul's powers vested in the president of the Select Committee, so as not to divide British authority. And if the Doris came up, Amherst was authorized to make frank admissions. Then came the warning. The officials of Canton and their patrons at court might stifle the truth before it reached the emperor. "This may prove to be the greatest danger your Lordship will have to encounter." Hold on to that line, because they were right, though not in the way they meant. On the ceremony itself the Company's instruction came down to this: have most regard to the effect the embassy would produce at Canton, and "make no concessions, in point of ceremony or reception, which appear calculated to diminish the national respectability of the English at that place". That was Sir George's view exactly. Here is the bind. The government said: do not let a trifle stop you. The Company said: whatever you do, do not kneel in a way that will cost us at Canton. One of the men who went with the embassy later put the contrast sharply: the government's instructions implied that they went "simply in search of whatever we could pick up," and judged the ceremony only by profit or loss. And the one man aboard who knew the court best was the Company's man.

Now, the Chinese side of the water. Someone had to tell Canton that an embassy was coming, and that was harder than it sounds. Years before, Sir George had told the viceroy that it was time for another embassy, and the viceroy had answered flatly: "I will not allow it." And in the settlement of 1814, the Committee had won the right to write to the higher officials in Chinese on everything except one thing: a letter announcing an embassy. Then there was the post. The definite instruction from London took seven months to arrive, landing on 25 May, only forty-five days before the Alceste itself appeared off the islands at the mouth of the river. Until then the Committee had thought it would be unwise to give official notice that an embassy was coming at all, with so much uncertain. Once the official word came, the intimation went on 28 May to the provincial governor, who was acting as viceroy. Guangdong had both a viceroy, over it and its neighbouring province, and a governor over Guangdong alone, and when the viceroy was away the governor stood in for him. They sent it through the provincial authorities deliberately, to remove any chance of the embassy being rejected on some technical ground, a breach of regulation or nonconformity to precedent. Even so, the Committee recognized that the prospect of a favourable reception was doubtful, given the disturbed state of the emperor's government and the despotism of the provincial officials. In short, the preliminaries were not so favourable as Macartney's had been. And you can see why the officials at Canton would not welcome it. An embassy that went over their heads to the emperor was an embassy that came to complain about them. That was exactly the danger the Company's committee had named in its letter to Amherst. The hong merchants knew what the court could cost them. They had just been made to put up two hundred and forty thousand taels toward the government's needs, and they had watched one of the linguists sent to hard labour at the frontier. If the British were angry, the merchants were the ones squeezed at Canton; if the court was angry, they were the ones blamed for the British. So when Wu Bingjian, the hong merchant who had once gone after Sir George on the river to bring him back, heard who was going, he went to one of the senior Company men, Sir Theophilus Metcalfe, with a warning. The foreign traders called him Howqua, and so will we. The emperor, he said, would not be pleased to hear that Sir George was travelling to Beijing again. Metcalfe's answer was short. He "merely replied" that whoever the King of England ordered "to go must go." So Sir George went. Notice what that exchange tells us. The directors in London assumed the emperor knew nothing of Canton; a merchant at Canton warned that the emperor did not want Sir George back, and Sir George ignored him. And it was the hong merchants who, answering the viceroy's mandate about him, had certified that he always remained quietly in his department, observing the laws.

Sir George Staunton, 2nd Baronet
Sir George Staunton, 2nd Baronet. Martin Archer Shee, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The embassy arrived off the mouth of the Hai River on 28 July, and at once the battle over the kowtow began. The question was argued on the way up the coast, at anchor off the river mouth, and then through the long discussions with the Chinese. On 8 August, the eve of landing at Tanggu, Amherst asked Sir George for his opinion in writing. Sir George wrote that he felt strongly "that a compliance therewith will be unadviseable even although the refusal should be attended with the hazard of the total rejection of the Embassy." He did not believe that kneeling would in the smallest degree help the embassy's objects, and the mere reception of the embassy, which he said could hardly be termed honourable, would be too dearly purchased by such a sacrifice. That is as clear as anything in this story. Even if refusing means they send us home, do not do it. Amherst himself was undecided. He was in strange waters, and he did not dare ignore the advice of his pilot, which is to say Sir George. He feared that if he refused, he would be sent away without an audience, and his mission would end in failure. Ellis thought the whole question a matter of indifference. He had begun with a different opinion from Sir George's, and he thought that, if the embassy were otherwise treated well, resisting on this one point was by no means essential to Britain's national respectability. He wrote that he had surrendered his opinion to Sir George's experience, but that if they were sent home he would wonder whether an audience was worth "sacrificing the distinction between nine prostrations of the head to the ground upon two knees, and nine profound bows upon one knee." That was the whole difference, put in a single sentence. The embassy landed at the mouth of the river leading to Tianjin, and two of the court's officials were sent to tell it the emperor's pleasure. The emperor had ordered a banquet for the ambassador at Tianjin, at which he was to give thanks by performing the ceremony of three kneelings and nine knocks of the head upon the ground. That was the kowtow in full: kneel, bow the forehead to the ground three times, rise, and do it all twice more. In the emperor's edict, Amherst was "the English Embassador sent to convey tribute". To the Qing court, every foreign envoy came bearing tribute; that was how it understood its dealings with the world beyond its borders, and the kowtow was how a tribute envoy showed he understood it too. Envoys from Korea, Siam and Vietnam performed the kowtow as a matter of course, and the emperor's own ministers knelt and knocked their heads before him all the time; to the court there was nothing humiliating in it. Even a Dutch embassy, only a couple of years after Macartney's, had performed the kowtow again and again without fuss, and been received. To the British, it looked like something else entirely: a king's representative declaring his king a vassal. If he performed it properly, he was to be brought on to Beijing the same day. If not, the officials were to report to the emperor and wait. The escorts began asking Amherst to practise his kowtow in front of a piece of yellow silk that represented the emperor. Amherst argued from precedent. Macartney had not kowtowed, he said, and Qianlong had still received him in audience. One of the escorting officials answered that Macartney in fact had performed the kowtow in 1793, and that was why Qianlong had received him, and that the Jiaqing Emperor himself remembered seeing it. And everyone turned to the one witness in the room. Sir George, who had been twelve years old in 1793, insisted that the kowtow had never taken place. Here the sources disagree. And this time it matters, because the whole negotiation hung on it. The court said Macartney had knelt and bowed in the full Qing form, and the emperor remembered it. The British accounts said he had refused, and only gone down briefly on one knee. Yet the diary Sir George himself kept as a boy in 1793 records that at one ceremony, at a signal, "we bent one knee and bowed down to the ground", and that they did it nine times. So the truth may have been somewhere in between, which was exactly the one place neither side could afford to stand. In private, the adult Sir George gave Amherst a fuller account: Macartney had done a polite hybrid, repeating an almost prostration nine times to come close to the proper Qing ceremony. Before the Chinese he merely hinted at the imperfect recollection he could retain of transactions which took place so long ago. The official was not impressed. Sir George was a fraud, he said, who had bought his position, and he was clearly lying to Amherst about what had happened in 1793. And remember: in the emperor's eyes, this was the boy who had made maps of the empire's rivers and mountains. Think about the position Sir George was in. The court needed Macartney to have kowtowed, because then Amherst had to. Sir George needed Macartney not to have, because then Amherst need not, and because he had been there. And the one British witness in the room was a man the emperor had already decided was a devious character. What did Amherst actually want? Not much, by the standards of Macartney's requests. He wanted to be able to communicate directly with a high committee in Beijing, and to trade freely with Chinese businessmen at Canton other than the hong merchants. He had also reported home that this emperor's reign, unlike his father's, was "frequently and very lately disturbed by insurrections of his subjects". From Tianjin the embassy went on up the river by boat toward Tongzhou, the river port just east of Beijing, and the argument went with it, day after day. So Amherst offered a compromise. He would go down on one knee and bow nine times, "for the sake of uniformity," or kneel and rise nine times, and he said that was more than he would do for any European sovereign. The court's chief negotiator was the Duke, Heshitai, who had been sent with a colleague to meet the embassy and drill it in the ceremony. Heshitai was a Manchu noble and the emperor's brother-in-law, a man of the inner court. On 22 August, the Duke gave the court's answer to Amherst and his interpreters. "Heaven does not have two suns," he said, "and Earth does not have two rulers." He made the stakes plain. If Amherst did not kowtow exactly as required, he would be expelled from the capital without an audience, and his gifts would be rejected. Amherst did not really see what all the fuss was about, and he gave way. On 27 August, a few days before the planned audience, he decided he would go ahead and perform the kowtow as requested. Sir George begged him to wait, and to put the question to the Company men in the embassy, the Canton gentlemen who would have to live with the consequences. They voted against it. The missionary was the lone dissenter: he said he saw no harm in it for the Company's interests. Sir George then asked that they consider his opinion as final, and Amherst did. Amherst wrote to the court offering again to go down on one knee, but he said he "found it absolutely impossible" to perform the kowtow as specified. The Company's men put the principle as they saw it: the kowtow could scarcely be performed when it was insisted upon as an acknowledgement that the Emperor of China was "the Sovereign of the Universe" and demanded as a duty from other rulers as his vassals. So, with some vacillation, Amherst decided not to perform it, and he kept to that refusal through the most insistent efforts of the court's ministers to change his mind. And then, oddly, a warm note arrived. The emperor sent a friendly message to Amherst's young son, asking how old he was and whether he had read any Chinese books. Amherst had brought his son Jeffery, about fourteen, just as Sir George's father had once brought him. It was the kind of gesture Qianlong had made to Sir George as a boy. For a moment it looked as if something might still be saved. It was not.

What happened next took less than two days. And it is worth slowing down for, because almost everything that went wrong went wrong in those hours. One of the escorts told Sir George that the emperor would receive Amherst on the morning after his arrival. Sir George thought it too soon, and ignored him. They set off from Tongzhou on 28 August, to travel through the night. At a hostel along the way they sat down to what Amherst himself called a "disgusting repast" of half plucked boiled fowl, meant to be English cooking. One of the escorts had promised that the city's eastern gate would be left open for them to pass through. Near midnight they reached it, and the massive outer gate was shut. They arrived at the imperial palace northwest of Beijing at dawn, disheveled and stinking. That palace was the Yuanmingyuan, the Garden of Perfect Brightness, the vast park of lakes and halls where the Qing emperors spent most of the year. They were put into a waiting chamber about seven feet by twelve. A crowd of court officials and eunuchs gathered around them. And they were told the emperor would see them now. In the edict he wrote afterwards, the emperor set down that on the morning of the seventh day of the moon, "after Breakfast, at half past five O’clock, I, the Emperor, dictated my pleasure, that I would ascend the Hall and call the Embassador to an audience." The seventh day of that moon was 29 August 1816. Amherst protested. He was bleary and unkempt, and his special outfit for the audience was still in his baggage, which had not arrived. He did not even have the letter from the Prince Regent that he was supposed to present to the emperor. He said he would not go. Think about what he was being asked to do: walk in before the emperor of China in the clothes he had travelled in all night, with nothing to present, and kneel. He asked for time to get his credentials, to dress and to recover, but to the last he declared his refusal to perform the kowtow. Then the court's patience ran out. Amherst was hustled by the nobles of the court and the ministers of state, dragged by the arm, and pushed in the direction of the emperor's reception hall for an immediate audience. Finally the Duke told him that, if he must, he could even perform his own ceremony of kneeling. Still Amherst refused. And then the ambassador of the King of Great Britain threw off their hands violently and shoved the surprised Duke backwards. He finally broke away. What the Duke did next is one of the strangest moments in the whole season. He snatched a whip from a guard and began violently beating the crowd of court officials and eunuchs, to clear a path for Amherst to get out. Ellis said the crowd "seemed to regard us rather as wild beasts than mere strangers of the same species with themselves". Meanwhile, inside, the emperor was waiting. The Duke reported to him that the ambassador could not travel fast, and that his pleasure should be asked again when he reached the gate. Then that the ambassador had a bowel complaint, and a short delay was necessary. Then that he was so ill he could not come at all. The emperor sent him to his lodging and ordered a physician to treat him, and called for the two assistant ambassadors instead. Then, the fourth time, that the assistant ambassadors were both sick too, and would come together with the ambassador when he recovered. Those assistants were Sir George and Ellis. You can picture the emperor's face. He wrote that China, the central nation, "is the Sovereign of the whole world", and asked why "contumely and arrogance like this" should "be endured with quiet temper". The emperor, angry at Amherst's conduct as it had been reported to him, ordered the embassy to go back at once, through a second night on the road, to Tongzhou, and from there to Canton. Tongzhou was the river port east of Beijing where the embassy had left its boats. Amherst had come fifteen thousand miles for an audience, and he never saw the emperor at all. He could not help noting the extreme difference between the decorous reception of Macartney at Qianlong's court and the proceedings at the court of Jiaqing. Here is the bitter part. The emperor had not set out to humiliate anybody that morning. Three days before the audience that never happened, the emperor had written in an edict that the Duke should, if necessary, be flexible. "Generally speaking," he wrote, "it is better to meet with them than to send them away." The emperor who had been ready to bend never learned in time that he needed to. He had wanted the audience. His escorts had given him no reason to imagine it might not take place. Instead they told him the ambassador was ill, and when the emperor sent his own physician, Amherst turned out to be perfectly healthy.

It took the emperor only a few days to find out what had really happened. Calling in his courtiers, he learned that the ambassador had travelled straight from Tongzhou to a room in the palace, on the road all night. And he learned what Amherst had actually said: "The Court Dresses, in which to enter and see His Majesty are yet behind they have not come up yet, How can I in my ordinary garments, lift up my eyes to the Great Emperor". In other words, the officials had been lying to him about Amherst's misgivings, so as not to displease him. So he wrote again, this time a vermilion edict. A vermilion edict was a paper written in the emperor's own hand. Vermilion was the red ink reserved for the emperor alone. He went back over everything. The deadline for the British to learn the ceremony, he wrote, had been the sixth day of the seventh moon. On the fifth, the Duke and his partner had sent him "a confused obscure report," and on the sixth they brought the embassy forward anyway. Sulengge and his colleague, who had escorted the embassy from the coast, had purposely acted against his orders by bringing the embassy on, and had let the British ships slip away. The ships had been meant to wait and carry the embassy home by sea. Without them it would have to travel the length of China by land and river. In fact the British ships had sailed off to explore the coasts of Korea and the Ryukyu islands, and would meet the embassy again at Canton. Then he turned to the Duke and his partner, sent to drill the British in the ceremony. On the sixth, at half past one, the emperor had come down to the "Hall of diligent Government" and called those two in, to ask whether the ceremony had been practised. They pulled off their caps and dashed their heads against the ground, saying it had not. Asked why they had not reported it, the Duke had said that tomorrow morning, when the British came to see the emperor, they would be able to perform it properly. Why, the emperor asked, did the Duke not tell him the truth, that night, or early the next day? All those ways were open to him. "I never supposed that a stupid statesman would injure affairs to this extent." Had they told him clearly, he wrote, he would have changed the time of the audience and of the ceremony. The crime of the Duke and his partner, he decided, was heavier than Sulengge's, and the Board would deliberate on all four men before he decided their fate. And then he turned the blame on himself. "I the Emperor have really not the face (I am ashamed) to appear before the Ministers beneath me, who are labourers for the State. It only remains for me to take blame to myself." The Duke, the chief culprit in the treatment of the ambassador, was degraded from his posts at court. It was a long fall for the emperor's own brother-in-law, sent only days before to drill the foreigners in the ceremony. As for the embassy, the emperor had already sent down his pleasure: to expel the ambassadors and send them back to their own country, "without punishing the high crime which they had committed." The emperor ordered the whole declaration proclaimed to those within China and beyond it. Even the Mongol princes, he wrote, were to be told. So who lost? Think about it from each side. The emperor lost an audience he had wanted. The Duke lost his posts, and four officials waited on the Board's judgement. And the British went home without an audience, their appeal to Beijing shown to be of no avail. Their own Company had warned them that the greatest danger was officials who would stifle the truth before it reached the emperor. That is what happened, only the officials who kept the truth from the emperor were not at Canton; they were the embassy's own escorts. So why did this embassy end even worse than Macartney's? Macartney had not gained one real advantage either, but he had at least had a decorous reception at Qianlong's court. Amherst came carrying instructions that pulled two ways, with an adviser the emperor had personally ordered watched, and escorts who would mislead their master rather than displease him. Every one of those pieces had been laid down in the years before he sailed. On the morning of the audience they all fell together. And Sir George, who had told Amherst that being sent home would be better than kneeling, got exactly what he had said he was willing to risk. Sir George, the boy who had been given a purse from Qianlong's own waist in 1793, had now been sent away by Qianlong's son without ever being seen. Next time, the embassy is sent the long way south to Canton, the emperor sends the King of England a mandate of his own, and the Alceste turns her full broadside on a fort at the mouth of the river.

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