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Britain’s Second Embassy to China: Lord Amherst's 'Special Mission' to the Jiaqing Emperor in 1816
Britain’s Second Embassy to China: Lord Amherst's 'Special Mission' to the Jiaqing Emperor in 1816, 2020
to deliver a paper on the British selection of presents for the Jiaqing emperor. While in London, I stayed with my friends Elizabeth and Allan Kelly, and I cannot thank them enough for their wonderful hospitality and stimulating company. Friends in Canberra have been very generous with their time and offers to read and comment on my work. I especially wish to thank Louis Magee and Ian Hancock for their enthusiastic and helpful comments on the first draft of this study. Particular thanks to Joan Ritchie, whose proofreading skills at an early stage were of considerable assistance. The staff at CIW provided a most conducive atmosphere for study. Sharon Strange's patience with formatting and help solving numerous computer problems is most appreciated. I also wish to thank Karina Pelling at CartoGIS, College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU, for drawing the maps included in this book. My final thanks, as always, go to my family. My son Bill and daughters Victoria and Alex remained a constant source of encouragement throughout the process of researching and writing this book. Special thanks go to my husband Rex, whose insights were invaluable and whose support made this possible. xi Note on Terminology and Romanisation and Monetary Values Note on Terminology and Romanisation In general, Chinese place names, personal names and terms are rendered into pinyin unless they are domesticated into English or are so common in the English-language historical literature of the Canton trade system that it would be confusing to do otherwise. Thus, Beijing is referred to as 'Peking', although 'Pekin' was used by the British at the time. Guangzhou is referred to as 'Canton', and its port, Huangpu, 12 miles downstream, as 'Whampoa'. The Zhujiang River is called the 'Pearl River', and the 'Bogue' or 'Bocca Tigris' refers to the Humen Strait situated at the start of the Pearl River. Chinese Government officials are referred to as 'mandarins'; these include the Hoppo, the chief superintendent of customs at Canton, who oversaw the activities of officially appointed Chinese merchants, referred to as the Hong merchants. The names of Chinese merchants of Canton and Macao have been left in their romanised form. Identifications, as far as they are possible, follow Van Dyke (2011). Chinese and Manchu officials have been identified where possible. The names of the senior mandarins who greeted the British in northern China have been rendered into pinyin based on Fu (1966, vol. II, pp. 627-681). Their anglicised names are given in Appendix E. Original spellings such as 'Embassador' and British spellings of Chinese names have been retained in direct quotations. Note on Present-Day Values of Money in the Period of the Amherst Embassy This study bases the value of the British Pound on the index agreed on in 2003 by the House of Commons Library, Bank of England and Office of National Statistics, where £10,000 in 1778 was approximately equivalent to £1 million in 2003 (Hague, 2004, p. 42). Figure 1: Lord Amherst in his peer's robes. Note: Engraving by S. Freeman, published in 1846, after painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1821. Source: National Library of Australia. 2 Charles Cathcart died of tuberculosis at Java. Amherst visited his tomb at the Anjere Roads on his outward voyage to China (Journal of Jeffrey Amherst, son of Lord Amherst, on his father's mission to China (n.d., n.p.) in British Library (BL) India Office Records (IOR) MSS EUR F 140/37). 3 This study refers to the Chinese court of 1644-1911 as the 'Qing court'. The Amherst Embassy is often referred to as being sent to the Jiaqing court, which refers to the Jiaqing emperor (r. February 1796-September 1820) who was the seventh emperor of the Qing dynasty. 11 1. INTRODUCTION and at the Ryukyu Islands, including Narrative of a voyage to Java, China, and the Great Loo-Choo Island published in 1840. 10 Reference to these are made in passing in this study, but no examination is made of either the surveys or British experiences at these places. This study refers to three unpublished journals that have received little attention from historians of the Amherst Embassy. The first is by the Rt Hon. Jeffrey Amherst, Amherst's 14-year-old son who accompanied the embassy as a page to his father, found in the British Library. 11 Zhang (2013) listed this journal in his bibliography but made no reference to it in his text, although he does refer, in passing, to the second resource, namely, the 'Diaries' of Amherst's private secretary, Henry Hayne. 12 William Fanshawe Martin, who travelled with the embassy as a 'First Class Volunteer' and midshipman on the Alceste, also left an account of his experiences in China. 13 This is also a rarely referenced resource, although Gao (2016) cited it in relation to the kowtow question. A resource that appears to be unknown to historians of the embassy is a volume of private letters sent to Amherst from his sister, Elizabeth Hale, who lived in Canada. While these contain little coverage of his appointment as ambassador to China, they are nevertheless valuable for the insight they provide into Amherst's private life (Hall & Shelton, 2002).
The Research of the Event of George Macartney in China
In 1793, Lord Macartney, an envoy of the British Empire, came to the palace of the Qing Empire, and met the most powerful ruler of East Asian, Emperor Qianlong. After several unsuccessful negotiations, the first direct contact of the two great empires of the world ended abruptly. According to an official statement of the current China’s government, says “At the occasion of Emperor Qianlong’s 80th birthday, and to congratulate the emperor, the British Government sent a mission to China, which was led by George Macartney, requesting to open up Ningbo, Zhoushan, Tianjin and other places as commercial ports, and to turn over the islands near Zhoushan and Guangzhou, in addition, they had other aggressive requirements, such as to reduce the rates. And the Qing government categorically refused all the requirements. ”
Cultural Difference in George Macartney's An Embassy to China, 1792-94
Eighteenth-Century Life, 2015
The British embassy led by George Macartney to the court of the Qiánlóng emperor in 1792-94 is a pivotal event in the history of Sino-British relations. It continues to be a subject not only of historical interest, but also for political debate. A recent editorial in The Economist (4 May 2013) used Macartney's embassy as a way of approaching the "Chinese Dream" doctrine of the new head of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping (11). Extensive scholarship has been devoted to describing the events of the embassy, to accounting for their historical and political significance, as well as to understanding the ethnographic and cultural implications of the meeting of British and Manchu cultures. Quite apart from the diplomatic outcome, the embassy produced two major controversies: the first by way of the negotiations about the ceremony that structured the meeting between the British ambassador and the Chinese emperor, engagements that led Macartney to refuse to koutou to the emperor, as per Qing custom, the second by way of the edict from the Qiánlóng emperor to George III that articulated the official Chinese view of the British and the embassy's goals, described by J. L. Cranmer-Byng as "perhaps the most important single Chinese document for the study of Sino-Western relations between 1700 and 1860." 1 Eighteenth-Century Life
This thesis discusses the complicated relationship between the religious and commercial arms of the British Empire during nineteenth-century China, specifically in the context of the opium trade. Protestant missionaries embraced the nineteenth-century notion that European civilization was superior and that the rest of the world was entitled to the sharing of wealth and free trade. As a result, missionaries fit nicely into the expansion of the British Empire, fostering what seemed like a mutually dependent relationship with traders and merchants, who allowed them passage on their ships to China in return for their Chinese language skills. However, due to the outlaw of missionaries in Qing China and missionaries' lack of resources, this relationship was skewed in the favor of merchants from the start. The reliance of British commerce on the opium trade made this a difficult situation for missionaries. The shared goals of missionaries and merchants, which was to enter and gain better access to China, justified missionaries' cooperation with their opium traders. As a result, despite their revulsion to the trade, missionaries such as Gützlaff chose to enter China intertwined in the illicit activities of British traders. Such missionaries chose to enter China with these damaging associations rather than completely miss the opportunity to proselytize in China. Their close connection between opium traders created a negative Chinese perception of missionaries, which grew in the form of anti-Christian movements towards the end of the nineteenth century. Missionaries' short term goals and dependence on merchants entangled them in the illicit opium trade and significantly undermined their long-term goals of evangelizing in China.
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Western technology or medicine or music. Those advances, especially those in science and technology, were strictly linked to the European and modern belief in progress. However, when the embassy returned to England in 1794 they brought back no diplomatic success. What they brought back was a great amount of information on China, observations made and written down by many of the crew. All these accounts are later edited and compiled by the embassy's second in command, Sir George Staunton (1737-1801) and were published as An authentic account of an embassy from the King of Great Britain to the emperor of China; including cursory observations made, and Information obtained, in travelling through that ancient Empire and a small part of Chinese Tartary in 1797.
On Sino-British Relationship before Opium War
The evolution of modern Sino-British relationship embodies a concentrated reflectio n of the collision between Chinese and western cultures, as well as the growth and decline of aggregate strength of China and western countries. The Sino-British relationship in the past three hundred years can be clearly divided into three stages. From the 16 th century to the 17 th century the mythological Chinese portrait attracted the British who showed tremendous interest in China. In addition to their frequent economic trade and exchanges, Chinese decrees and regulations, philosophy, literature, handicrafts and horticulture exerted an extensive influence on Britain. In the 18 th century Britis h admiration for China reached a climax, which brought forth a craze for China. In the first half of the 19 th century the harmonious Sino-British relationship came to an end due to the collision of systems.
Tea's Empire: Opium and the Price of Tea in China
Tea has long been associated as the national drink of England and Britain. Like most national commodities, tea represents an invented tradition of British national identity. The history of British tea, however, has long been ignored, left to the periphery of commodity history, only to be picked up tangentially within general works on British Imperialism or to support British nationalism. The result of this is that the British tea trade has never received the proper commodity chain historiography that a product of such global importance deserves. The limitations of tea's historiography can be traced to the nearly single-minded connections between tea and ideas of British culture. Tea, for the British, remains a cultural facet with too many gaps to provide a full cultural-commodity chain in the modus operandi as proposed by the likes of Kenneth Pomerantz and Steven Topik. The development of British tea culture, unlike the rise and fall of coffee in the British Isles, can only be explained through constant starts and stops. Introduced to the court by Caterina of Braganza, the wife of Charles II, but sporadically evident among the wider population of England at least five years earlier, tea has no clear origin story within the realm of public consumption. As Cowan notes in his work, The Social Life of Coffee, the shift from coffee to tea amongst British consumers was primarily a product of a " new fiscal system which made coffee relatively more expensive and tea relatively