In my last blog post, I mentioned Lord Macartney’s embassy to China in 1793. It was an aside to a post that was itself not much more than an aside, but, as so often happens around here, one story led me to another.

A beautiful copy of the journal Macartney kept about his time in China has been sitting unread on my bookshelves for a long, long time. (Roughly twenty years. Yikes!) I pulled it off the shelf to see if I could find any details about John Crewe’s role in the expedition.[1] You will not be surprised to hear that I was immediately sucked in. The journal now has a place on the ever-growing stack of partially read books next to my reading chair.[2] It will take me a while to get through it. But that doesn’t mean that you should have to wait to hear the story of the embassy and its consequences.

In the eighteenth century, China was a hot market from the European perspective, the source of luxury items such as silk, tea, and porcelain.[3] The Chinese were not interested in European merchandise or European ideas. In 1760, the Chinese emperor declared that all foreign trade would be limited to the port of Canton (now Guangzhou). Even within Canton, European merchants were only allowed to trade in Canton for five months of the year, and were limited in where they could live, what they could trade and who they could trade with.

In 1793, the British government sent Lord George McCartney (1737-1820) on diplomatic mission to China with the goal of establishing a British ambassador at the Court of Beijing, improved trading conditions in Canton, and access to additional trading ports.. Macartney seemed like the perfect man for the job. He had previous diplomatic experience, having served as a special envoy to the Empress Catherine of Russia, and as the governor of British possessions first in Grenada and then in Madras. When he was home in England, he was an active member of The Club, the group of intellectual and scientific men who gathered around Samuel Johnson[4]—making him well suited to the intellectual complexities of the assignment. James Boswell summed up The Club’s opinion of Macartney’s assignment when he described it as a “magnificent, dangerous embassy.”

The embassy was doomed to failure. Britain and China came to the table with very different, and mutually exclusive, ideas about what the meeting entailed. Macartney believed he was there to negotiate with the emperor as the representative of an equal power. He carried British-made products intended to impress the Chinese: clocks, watches, carriages and pottery.[5] The Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1796) and his court saw Macartney’s goods as tribute presents from a lesser power—and not very impressive ones at that.  The difference in their viewpoints were summed up in the courtly ritual known as the kowtow, or prostration. Macartney was expected to prostrate himself before the emperor, and touch his head to the ground multiple times. Instead he went down on one knee and bowed his head, as he would bowed to the British king.

Not surprisingly, the Chinese refused all of Britain’s requests. The Chinese Emperor sent a condescending note to King George III explaining his refusal:  “I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and I have no use for your country’s manufacture.”

The Macartney embassy was the first of several diplomatic failures that led to the Opium Wars

[1] No luck, other than confirming that Lt. John Crewe was indeed a member of the small military escort that accompanied Macartney’s ambassadorial “suite”: a group that included a painter, a watchmaker, a gardener/botanist, a natural philosopher (scientist) a mechanic/mathematical instrument maker (also a scientist of sorts), and a draftsman, one William Alexander, who recorded their experiences in over 1000 watercolor sketches. These were published in two books in 1805 , The Costume of China and Dress and Manners of the Chinese. A number of his sketches illustrate my copy of the journal, and they are lovely indeed.

But I digress

[2] Some of which have been in that pile for a while now. I am easily distracted.

[3] They also imported zinc, which was not technically a luxury product. It was, however, a was a critical element in making brass, and hence necessary for a whole range of scientific instruments and consumer goods that were being developed in Europe. None of which interested the Chinese.

[4] A group I have long wanted to know more about. Also the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which was more heavily scientific and industry-oriented than The Club

[5] Bringing pottery, even Wedgwood’s finest, to the home of fine porcelain is an example of how little the British understood about the people they were negotiating with.