The memorial was returned with annotations in vermillion brushstrokes from the emperor’s own hand: ‘We will transmit instructions to you.’ The countless cogs of the state’s vast bureaucratic machinery had glided silently into motion. From that moment, every step of the embassy was monitored and logged, every act recorded and transmitted to the emperor by special runners who worked in relays that could cover as much as six hundred li in a day. Edicts from Beijing were dispatched back to the provinces, copied, given a response and returned. The emperor added his final marginal notes in red ink before the runners headed back posthaste to the provinces. The system had operated for centuries and had been overhauled by Qianlong’s father, the Yongzheng Emperor. In Qianlong’s reign, hundreds of documents could be on the road at any one time, connecting the centre through a web of highly trained mandarin officials across vast distances to the daily affairs of every far-flung corner of the empire.
The embassy cast off from Macau to the sound of church bells calling the faithful to Mass. It proceeded up the coast and stopped at the Zhoushan Islands, off the coast of Zhejiang, just south of modern-day Shanghai. It was here that the embassy had its first inkling that protocol was to become a major obstacle to its success.
The mandarin official sent to accompany the embassy to Beijing refused to step on board the ship. Imperial regulations required imperial officials to ‘descend onto the barbarian vessel,’ but the ship was too large for the Chinese to construct the customary bamboo walkway downward from the quay towards the boat. It was simply inconceivable that the mandarin would contemplate clambering upward onto the decks, so he refused to go on board at all. Instead he sent provisions including some twenty steers, more than a hundred sheep and hogs, a hundred ducks, and 160 sacks of flour as the first, emphatic demonstration of the excesses of Chinese hospitality.
Confusion over the gifts brought for the emperor from England was the next difficulty; etiquette required Macartney to understate their value but he couldn’t bring himself to describe them as ‘mere trinkets from our poor country’, as the mandarin had suggested. Next he discovered that the Chinese version of the list of gifts was riddled with translation errors. Passing from English to Latin, then to Chinese and finally into official court language, it had been converted into gibberish. Macartney had brought a planetarium to demonstrate Europe’s achievements in combining an understanding of the motion of celestial bodies – including the four moons of Jupiter – with the latest in precision engineering. But the Chinese had no idea what it was. Planetarium had been translated phonetically and rendered meaningless. After much discussion it was listed as a ‘geographical and astronomical musical clock’. In the end, the Chinese never read the list or even wondered what the articles might be; all that mattered was that the number of individual items was correct and that the list was complete.
These translation difficulties propelled an unlikely character to the fore. Macartney’s deputy had brought along his son, a boy named Thomas Staunton, who had picked up some Chinese language from the two priests on the long voyage. The youth, whose ‘senses were more acute and organs more flexible, proved to be a tolerably good interpreter’, so he took over much of the translation.
Once the gifts had been properly categorized, the ships moved farther up the coast towards Tianjin, where they were to be packed into crates, loaded onto junks, and transported to the docks at Dagu. There they would be transferred onto smaller junks and taken inland by canal before finally going ashore for the twelve-mile journey to Beijing. A memorial to the emperor read:
In all, there are 590 pieces to be transferred from the barbarian ships to the port. The handling operation is proceeding without interruption but is not yet complete. The passengers of the ships will enter the port only after the tribute has been fully unloaded.
‘This is excellent and we fully approve,’ wrote the vermillion brush.
It was at Dagu that the embassy first encountered Chinese delaying tactics. They had been travelling for almost a year and were impatient to see the emperor. But now they were told that a viceroy had suddenly arrived to greet them. Ushered into a large hall in a temple, surrounded by tents with streamers and guarded by horsemen with bows and arrows, they were entertained with elaborate tea ceremonies, enquiries about their health, and explanations of ‘the emperor’s satisfaction with their arrival’. Macartney fumed quietly and fidgeted throughout the banquet until the viceroy suddenly announced that the embassy would only be granted an audience in Jehol, the emperor’s summer retreat, rather than in Beijing as previously planned. This sudden change in destination presented a major complication; many of the delicate instruments would be damaged on such a long overland journey to Jehol. But before Macartney could respond, the viceroy announced that he would be leaving the next day and planned to return only after six weeks.
Around this time, the central problem of the embassy became clear. For a foreigner to meet the emperor, or even receive an edict from him, he had to perform the ke-tou, or kow-tow. This ‘head-bumping ceremony’ consisted of first standing upright, then grovelling on the floor, banging one’s head against the ground three times, standing up, then going back down on all fours, banging the forehead again, and repeating the whole procedure three times so that nine head bumps were performed in all. It never occurred to the Chinese that Macartney might object. As far as they were concerned, the kow-tow was simply a formality by which a barbarian submitted to the perfection of the Celestial Empire in order to prepare himself for the benefits of civilization. Anyway, there was no precedent for doing anything else. But Macartney was having none of it; as representative of George III, he only agreed to go down on one knee. He only went down on two knees for the Almighty, so grovelling on all fours in front of some Oriental despot was entirely out of the question. So the two sides entered a phase of protracted negotiations. The Chinese addressed the matter obliquely – first by suggesting that the Englishmen might like to change their clothes, since the kow-tow would be easier to perform without garters and knee buckles. Macartney made a counterproposal: he would produce a portrait of George III and whatever ceremony he performed in front of the emperor, a mandarin of equivalent rank would perform in front of the portrait of the English king.
Meanwhile, Macartney had been informed that the characters on the banners on boats escorting the embassy had been quietly changed from
On 21 August 1793, a little short of a year after leaving Portsmouth, the embassy passed by the great corner watchtowers of the Imperial City. Guards of honour fired salvos from the ramparts while three thousand porters passed through the enormous double gateways carrying nearly six hundred packages, some so large they needed thirty-six men to carry them. They were followed by eighty-five wagons and thirty-nine handcarts filled with wine, beer, and other European produce. Eight pieces of artillery brought up the rear. Inside, the visitors were confronted by a human anthill. Brides went to their future husbands with squalling music and gongs; mourners dressed in white wailed over the departed. Wheelbarrows groaned under stacks of watermelons next to pots of live eels while, under the swooping eaves of the great gateways to the Imperial City, long lines of dromedaries brought coal from Tartary.
The embassy settled into the quarters near the Old Summer Palace, the Garden of Perfect Brightness, and awaited instructions to proceed to Jehol for the audience with the emperor. The accommodation was adequate, although one member of the expedition couldn’t help noticing the smell of ‘putrefying garlic and over-used blankets’.
By this time, Macartney had begun to realize that China had the most ritualized society on earth. Ceremonial rites formed one of the key foundations of Confucianism, and Confucianism underpinned the Chinese sense of identity. The Celestial bureaucracy consisted of six tribunals,