‘It could have been nationalized!’
‘Right,’ said another. ‘I saw a report about the government seizing a property business in Shanghai. They’d had riots there about some unfinished apartments.’
‘Hang on!’ I spluttered. ‘Can we try to get back to reality here? People are still buying fridges in China and the factory hasn’t exploded. There hasn’t been a fire and the factory can’t be nationalized because the government already controls it! No one has ever mentioned price, so why would they want to stiff you? We have to figure out what they really want. Try to look at it from their side. Wang’s sitting in a medium-sized town way out in the sticks in China working in some old broken-down chemical factory minding his own business and shuffling bits of paper, and then you all come along and offer him a hundred million bucks if he installs a few incinerators. Why would he want to stiff you?’
‘Bunch of yahoos, if you ask me,’ someone muttered in the background.
‘Look,’ continued another more sharply, ‘this deal has changed so many times, the syndicate’s already wobbling. If we just go back and ask them to double their money, it’ll blow the whole thing out of the water.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but something must have happened to change the situation here. We need to take a bit of time to find out what that is. Wang’s in a different world; it makes no difference to him personally whether this deal gets done or not, but if you get it right, your investors will make a fortune. Whatever happens with this deal, Wang’s salary will just stay the same. But if something goes wrong later, he’ll get blamed by his boss. All his housing and his pension and his kid’s education are organized by the factory. Wang’s never going to risk all that for something where he’s got nothing to gain. If we try to put pressure on him, he’ll just clam up and do nothing.’
‘Absolute bollocks!’ I heard someone say in the background just before a click as the phone cut off. Then there was silence.
I looked at Mina.
‘So where does that leave us?’ I asked after a few moments.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, rolling her eyes with a sigh. ‘We’ll get a nasty email in the morning.’
How Can We Go So Far as to Change the Regulations of the Celestial Empire – Which are Over a Hundred Years Old – at the Request of One Man – of You, O King!?
—Edict of the Qianlong Emperor to King George III of England, August 1793
We were not the first band of foreigners to be kept waiting and given the runaround in China, nor the first to be sent with impossible instructions. For years visitors have felt confused, rebuffed and bamboozled by what they’ve found there; and none of them more so than the British.
In the autumn of 1792, while the world was preoccupied by the French Revolution, three ships set sail quietly from the south coast of England. King Louis XVI of France had been deposed and there’d been massacres in the prisons. Guillotine blades skidded down greased runners as carts piled high with severed heads rumbled through the shadows around the walls of the old Bastille; Europe braced for war. So the dispatch by George III of an embassy to China attracted little attention as it cast off with the morning tide on 26 September. The expedition was led by a former ambassador to the Russian tsarina, the Right Honourable Lord Macartney, and consisted of physicians, astronomers, painters, musicians, clockmakers, soldiers and servants, numbering more than seven hundred in all. The purpose of the mission was explained in a letter carried by the ambassador from His Britannic Majesty to the Celestial Emperor as follows:
We have taken opportunities of fitting out Ships and sending in them some of the most wise and learned of Our Own People, for the discovery of distant regions … Our ardent wish [is] to become acquainted with the celebrated institutions of Your Majesty’s populous and extensive Empire … [T]hese considerations have determined Us to depute an Ambassador to Your Court [for] communication with … your Sublime Person … [W]e rely on Your Imperial Majesty’s wisdom that You will allow Our Subjects frequenting the coasts of Your dominions fair access to Your markets.
Imperator Augustissime
Vester bonus frater et Amicus
Georgius R
This was not the first embassy to tackle China; Portugal, the Netherlands and Russia had all sent ambassadors on more than one occasion, but they had each returned empty-handed. The gates to the Celestial Empire, it seemed, remained hermetically sealed. France had sent missionaries, and a handful of Jesuit priests had lived in Beijing for a number of years, but none had ever returned. In fact, Macartney’s was the sixteenth embassy sent to pry open the gates, but it was the first worthy of the name. Supremely confident, possessed of the world’s most powerful navy, and poised on the threshold of the Industrial Revolution, the British were fixed upon impressing the ancient Middle Kingdom with gifts that displayed the most ingenious inventions of the modern European age; but more important – as George III stated in his letter – they were determined to open the channels of trade.
Macartney’s first problem was finding translators; there weren’t any. He eventually recruited two Chinese priests who had been living at the Collegium Sinicum in Naples. Although they knew no English, they could communicate with passable Latin. Father Li’s teeth had been ruined by smoking and Father Zhou had that somewhat familiar passion for crunching dried melon pips, which Macartney described as ‘a habit not easily tolerated by a gentleman.’ Impressed by Li’s single-minded commitment to smoking, Macartney was later less surprised than he might have been to find out that everyone smoked in China – even the children, who came running out of houses with pipes between their teeth. In fact, smoking was so prevalent that if someone was deathly ill and on his last legs, the Chinese would say, ‘He’s so ill he can’t even smoke any more.’
After leaving the English Channel, the embassy was blown off course in the Atlantic and the ships became separated. They only regrouped the following March at Batavia – now Jakarta – in what was then known as the Dutch East Indies. Eleven days later, they set sail northwards. After more than nine months at sea, the embassy finally caught sight of the Chinese mainland and dropped anchor at Macao. Terrified of being caught assisting the embassy, one of the translators skipped ship and disappeared – Macartney had heard that Chinese were forbidden to leave China and that the punishment for teaching Mandarin to a foreigner was death. The other, a Tatar whose Chinese was less fluent, took the more imaginative option of disguising himself as a foreigner.
The embassy, meanwhile, was under strict surveillance by the watchful mandarins onshore. Prior to his arrival, Macartney had requested permission to visit Beijing from the customs house in Canton, not through the provincial governor as required by the Celestial Regulations. The governor, unsettled by this ignorance of court etiquette, had sent an anxious memorial to the emperor seeking further instructions:
Upon their arrival in Canton, the English barbarians asked to be taken to the Customs Office to present a request. We immediately granted them an audience. Their report states that the King of England … has dispatched an envoy. The Rites require that barbarians, once granted permission to enter a port, present a copy of their sovereign’s request, along with a list of the articles of tribute. The king of England, however, has supplied us with neither of these