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Wall to wall
The Great Wall can be seen as a metaphor for China’s relationship with the world, argues Julia Lovell in her new history of the monument. In this excerpt, she recounts the historic — and ultimately frustrating — encounter between the first official British envoy to China and the Qianlong Emperor
On 26 September 1792, King George III dispatched the first British trade mission to China, a 700- strong party that included diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, scientists, painters, a watchmaker, a gardener, five German musicians, two Neapolitan Chinese priests and a hot-air balloon pilot. Packed into three substantial ships, they brought with them the most impressive fruits of recent Western scientific progress — telescopes, clocks, barometers, airguns and, naturally, a hot-air balloon — all intended to dazzle the Chinese emperor, Qianlong, into opening trade with the West, by convincing him that he and his 313 million people needed Britain’s technological marvels.
In June 1793, after nine months at sea… the British mission reached Macao, the Portuguese enclave off the southern coast of China whose tropical humidity daubed the island’s buildings with green mould. For the next four months, the British and their extensive cargo crawled up the coast towards an audience with the Emperor in his northern capital, Beijing. They were observed at all times by a suspicious imperial bureaucracy, which deluged the British party with hospitality — on one day alone, the British were provided with 200 items of poultry — while managing to avoid helping further the cause of the embassy in any material way. On finally completing their pilgrimage to Beijing, the British were told the Emperor would only receive them further north, at his summer retreat in cool, mountainous Jehol.
When the British — almost a year after leaving Portsmouth and with their accompanying band wearing loaned green and gold fancy-dress already used at least once previously by a French embassy — were at last ushered into the celestial imperial presence on the occasion of His birthday and presented George III’s written requests in a jewel-encrusted box, the Emperor received them with no more than reserved cordiality. Perhaps because he had read too many excitable rumours about the British presents in the Chinese press, which speculated that the British had brought foot-high dwarfs and an elephant the size of a cat, the Emperor was underwhelmed by the reality of telescopes, planetariums and carriages.
The presents assembled by Dinwiddie, the embassy’s astronomer, in the summer palace at Beijing, Qianlong commented, were useful merely for the amusement of children… The spring-suspension coach the British brought, hoping to open the door to exports, was immediately deemed impossible for the Emperor to use, on the grounds that Qianlong could never ‘suffer any man to sit higher than himself, and to turn his back towards him’.
Qianlong made his formal reply to British requests in a special edict presented to Macartney [the first British envoy] on 3 October but actually composed on 30 July, more than six weeks before the British had met the Emperor and handed over their gifts. The mission, in other words, had been doomed long before it neared its destination. ‘We have never valued ingenious articles,’ Qianlong made clear, ‘nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures.’ He was true to his words: 70 years later, when British and French soldiers destroyed the Imperial Summer Palace just outside Beijing, Macartney’s presents were discovered, untouched, in a stable…
But the greatest stumbling block was that of diplomatic etiquette. Late Qing China was locked into the traditional Chinese vision of international relations, in which all foreigners were backward barbarians with little or nothing to offer Chinese civilisation and whose rightful relationship with the imperial court was one of respectful subordination. According to idealised Chinese diplomatic conventions over one-and-a-half millennia old, foreigners were (theoretically at least) allowed to visit China only as inferior vassals bringing tribute, not as political equals and certainly not as representatives of ‘the most powerful nation of the globe’ — as Macartney and the British confidently saw themselves.
Instead of a ministry of foreign affairs, Qing China possessed a (Tribute) Reception Department, fully equipped with a complex range of regulations governing the frequency, length, size and number of prostrations required of tributary envoys. The Chinese and the British would never be able to agree on terms for trade while they couldn’t even agree on terms for each other’s existence. To call the Sino-British encounter of 1793 a clash of civilisations is an overstatement: neither side found enough common diplomatic ground even to get within a whiff of a collision.
As a pragmatic envoy, but also a proud Briton, Macartney spent weeks wrangling over diplomatic protocol. A particular sticking point was his refusal to perform the kowtow, the obligatory gesture of deference to the Emperor: a set of three genuflections, each containing three full prostrations with the head touching the ground. Macartney was prepared to tip his hat, go down on one knee and even kiss the Emperor’s hand (this third option, horrified Chinese officials quickly made clear, was quite out of the question), but he would not kowtow unless a Chinese official of equal rank to him kneeled before a portrait of George III.
This last proposal was even more inappropriate than hand-kissing: Qianlong was the ruler of ‘all under heaven’ (tianxia, a traditional Chinese usage for China) — his subjects could never admit the equal authority of another sovereign. The idea of China as the centre of the civilised world, to whom all other peoples owe allegiance, is one of the most resilient threads running through Chinese history. Even today, 160 years after the Opium Wars began forcing China out of the tributary system and into modern international trade and diplomacy, some Chinese historians still cannot believe that Macartney never kowtowed to the Emperor.
When Macartney and the mandarins were not arguing about the major issue of whether the British would kowtow to the Emperor, they nitpicked over whether Macartney’s offerings to Qianlong were ‘presents’ or ‘tribute’. Macartney insisted they were presents from the ambassador of a diplomatic equal; just as firmly, Qianlong maintained that Macartney was no more than a subordinate ‘conveyor of tribute’…
After this spectacular diplomatic failure, it should come as no surprise that the travel memoirs of members of the British embassy were less than complimentary towards China… Only one thing met with universal British approval: the Great Wall. Macartney and his company made use of their lengthy waiting time in China to undertake a little tourism. En route in his neat English post-chaise to meet the Emperor in Jehol, Macartney stopped at the Gubeikou pass, north-east of Beijing, to have a closer look at the wall. This is ‘exhibition Great Wall’ country, providing the kind of vistas that had even the haughty British filling their journals with superlatives: walls and towers snaking over the spines of cloud-dappled mountains, brushed with green scrub in summer (as Macartney would have witnessed), dusted with snow in winter… Staggered by what he saw, Macartney proclaimed the whole thing ‘the most stupendous work of human hands’.
Macartney’s visit marks a crucial episode in the modern history of both China and the Great Wall, his experiences and reactions helping to construct the view of the Wall that is still widely, if erroneously, held today. Macartney encountered and identified two Great Walls: the physical, bricks-and-mortar version now familiar to millions of appreciative tourists, built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries AD, and the mental wall that the Chinese state had built around itself to repel foreign influences and to control and encircle the Chinese people within. His admiration for China’s physical wall, together with his frustration at the mental wall, were to become typical of nineteenth-century Western politicians, merchants and adventurers eager to trade with China. Macartney and his fellow tourists helped begin the construction of the Great Wall of China as we now see it…
By the turn of the [nineteenth] century, the Wall had been definitively labelled by Western observers as ‘Great’, as the ‘most wonderful wonder of the world’, built (extrapolating from a sketchy reference in a Chinese history of the second century BC) around 210 BC by China’s First Emperor, and responsible for protecting China from the Huns and redirecting them instead towards the sacking of Rome. Western enthusiasm made verifiable historical facts about the Wall unnecessary: it was enough to assume, as Macartney and his fellow travellers did, that the Wall as it presently stood was thousands of years old, a symbol of Chinese civilisation, power and precocious technological accomplishment, overwhelmingly successful in intimidating unwanted intruders, uniform in its bricks-and-mortar course across the thousands of kilometres of China’s fixed northern border…
At the same time, the invisible Great Wall encircling the Chinese, and determined to exclude Macartney and his barometers, was identified as the cause of the empire’s isolationist stagnation, emblematic of autocratic, landlocked China’s lack of interest in maritime trade and conquest, of its failure to keep step with historical progress as defined by the Western colonial powers. Between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the colossal physical reality of the Wall combined with its powerful visual symbolism to transform the Great Wall into the all-defining emblem of China in the Western imagination.
© RA Magazine
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