British Government under the Qianlong Emperor’s Gaze: Satire, Imperialism, and the Macartney Embassy to China, 1792–1804

The failure of the Macartney Embassy (1792–94), the first face-to-face diplomatic meeting between Britain and China, has often been understood as a crucial turning point in relations between the two nations. China was recognised by the British as a pre-eminent Asian power, and the embassy was intended to formalise and expand a trading relationship that, since the establishment of British trade at Canton around 1700, had become increasingly lucrative. Planned by the East India Company and the Pitt Government, and led by one of Britain’s most experienced diplomats, George Macartney (1737–1806), the embassy was intended as a lavish and dignified spectacle, designed to “impress the minds of the Chinese with a favourable impression of the Embassy, this Country and its commerce.” Equipped at the huge cost of £78,000, it carried a number of gifts intended to demonstrate British scientific and artistic achievement, including a mechanical planetarium, a carriage for the Emperor’s use, and a hot air balloon and pilot. However, although Macartney was received courteously in Beijing in August and September 1793, he failed (as did a Dutch embassy the following year) to win any specific guarantees from Chinese officials, and during the return journey overland to Canton he received a letter from the Qianlong emperor promising friendship between the two nations, but rejecting all British trade requests. Scholars have often argued that British anger at this “failure” is swiftly channelled into a renewed level of “rhetorical violence” in British writing on the country, paving the way for the actual violence of the Opium Wars in the nineteenth century. David Porter has argued that the embassy causes the demise of an “optimistic fantasy concerning the possibilities of Chinese commerce” held by British politicians, artists, and writers, replaced by a new understanding of Chinese government as “in every respect inimical to the unquestioned values of a modern mercantile society.” James Hevia has shown how, for nineteenth-century commentators on Chinese politics, the Macartney Embassy serves as a crucial “point of origin,” invoked to demonstrate the necessity of “a much more aggressive stance by the British government towards the Qing empire.” Within a decade, the publication of a volume of Travels in China (1804), by the embassy’s comptroller John Barrow, inaugurated a new and far more hostile mode of political commentary on the country, by blaming the embassy’s failure solely on the unreasonable behaviour of the Chinese government, and arguing that Macartney’s major accomplishment had been to preserve national dignity by refusing to perform the kowtow ceremony: “by no trick, nor artifice, nor stretch of power, could [the Chinese] prevail on an English Embassador to forego the dignity and respect due to the situation he held at their court.” In nineteenth-century British interpretations of the embassy, the kowtow is given particular prominence, not only as the “cause” of the embassy’s failure, but also as a defining symbol of the “collision” between two incompatible world-views: a British belief in reciprocal relations between equal nations, and a Chinese tributary system supposedly unsuited to the modern trading world. However, studies of the Macartney Embassy have not previously ventured beyond travel narratives by embassy participants and East India Company documents to assess its broader reception by British public opinion during the 1790s. During this period, China assumed a prominence in public debate perhaps unrivalled by any other point in the eighteenth century. Thanks to skilful government promotion, which focused in particular upon the lavish gifts to be presented to the Chinese emperor, Macartney’s mission received far more attention than an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to send an embassy under Colonel Cathcart in 1787–8 (ended by Cathcart’s death en …