Macartney Embassy (1793): Britain's Mission to Qing China

The Macartney Embassy of 1792–1794 was the first British diplomatic mission to the Qing Empire. Led by George, Lord Macartney, it reached China in the summer of 1793 hoping to open the country to wider trade. The Qianlong Emperor received the envoy at his summer retreat at Chengde but rejected every request, and the episode became a symbol of the gulf between Britain and China on the eve of the modern era.

Background: tea, silver and the Canton system

By the late eighteenth century Britain had developed an enormous appetite for Chinese tea. The British East India Company, which held a monopoly on British trade with Asia, bought millions of pounds of tea each year, along with silk and porcelain. China wanted few British goods in return, so much of the trade was paid for in silver.

Under the Canton system, established by imperial order in 1757, European merchants could trade only at Guangzhou (Canton) and only through licensed Chinese merchant houses known as the Hong. Foreigners were confined to a small area outside the city walls, could stay only during the trading season, and had no direct contact with officials. British traders complained of arbitrary fees and the lack of any legal protection.

An earlier attempt to send an envoy, under Colonel Charles Cathcart in 1787–1788, ended when Cathcart died on the voyage. The government of William Pitt and Henry Dundas then chose George Macartney, an experienced diplomat who had served as envoy to Russia and governor of Madras, to try again. The East India Company paid for the mission.

The voyage and arrival in China

The embassy sailed from Portsmouth in late September 1792. The flagship was HMS Lion, a 64-gun warship commanded by Sir Erasmus Gower, accompanied by the East Indiaman Hindostan and a smaller supply vessel. In all, around 700 people travelled with the expedition, including soldiers, artisans, scientists, servants and crew.

Macartney’s deputy was Sir George Leonard Staunton, whose eleven-year-old son George Thomas Staunton came as a page. The party included the artist William Alexander, the scientist James Dinwiddie, the physician Hugh Gillan and John Barrow, who later became a senior Admiralty official. Because no Briton spoke Chinese well, the embassy relied on Chinese Catholic priests trained in Naples, one of whom, known as Jacobus Li, served as the main interpreter.

The ships carried hundreds of crates of gifts chosen to show British skill and science. These included a large planetarium, telescopes, globes, clocks, scientific apparatus, Wedgwood porcelain, textiles, firearms and models of warships. Macartney hoped they would demonstrate that Britain was a powerful and inventive nation worth dealing with as an equal.

The fleet reached the Chinese coast in the summer of 1793, called at Zhoushan and then sailed north to the Gulf of Bohai. Its members were transferred to river junks near Tianjin in early August. Over the boats flew banners with Chinese characters that the British understood to mean “tribute bearers from England”. Macartney chose not to protest.

The Qing court treated the embassy within its long-established system of foreign relations. In this framework, foreign rulers sent envoys to present tribute to the emperor, who received them with generosity as the centre of the civilised world. The British, by contrast, saw themselves as representatives of an equal sovereign state.

The embassy stayed for a time near the imperial garden palace of Yuanmingyuan outside Beijing, where some of the largest gifts were assembled. The emperor himself was at Chengde, also called Jehol or Rehe, his summer retreat beyond the Great Wall, where he would celebrate his eighty-third birthday by Chinese reckoning. Macartney and a reduced party travelled there in early September.

The kowtow dispute

The most famous dispute concerned the kowtow, the ritual of kneeling three times and touching the head to the ground nine times before the emperor. Qing officials expected Macartney to perform it. Macartney refused unless a Chinese official of equal rank performed the same ceremony before a portrait of George III, a proposal the court did not accept.

A compromise was eventually reached. On 14 September 1793, in a large tent in the gardens at Chengde, Macartney went down on one knee, as he would before his own sovereign, and presented George III’s letter in a gold box. According to the British accounts he did not prostrate himself. Some Chinese sources suggest he performed fuller obeisance, and historians still debate exactly what happened.

The audience was courteous. The emperor gave gifts, including a ruyi sceptre for George III. The young George Thomas Staunton, who had learned some Chinese on the voyage, spoke a few words to the emperor and received a small embroidered purse from his own belt, a moment recorded in the embassy’s accounts.

The requests, the reply and the journey home

Macartney’s proposals were detailed. He asked for a permanent British envoy in Beijing, trade at Zhoushan, Ningbo and Tianjin, a small island near Zhoushan where British merchants could live and store goods, a warehouse in Beijing, and fixed, published customs duties at Canton.

The court, under the senior minister Heshen, gave Macartney little chance to negotiate. Back in Beijing in late September, he received in early October two edicts from the Qianlong Emperor addressed to George III. They rejected every request. A permanent envoy, the emperor said, was against the customs of the dynasty, and foreign trade was already provided for at Canton.

The first edict contains the most quoted passage of the whole episode. In the widely used English translation published in 1914, the emperor tells the king that “we possess all things” and have no need of British manufactures. The line was later taken in Britain as proof of Chinese arrogance and isolation. Historians now stress that the edicts reflected Qing diplomatic convention and political caution, and that the court was in fact well aware of Britain’s growing power in India.

The embassy left Beijing on 7 October 1793, sooner than Macartney wished. Instead of being sent straight back to the coast, it travelled south for more than two months along the Grand Canal and inland waterways to Hangzhou and then overland to Canton, escorted by officials. The journey allowed the British to observe Chinese towns, farms, waterworks and military posts in unusual detail.

At Canton, Macartney had friendlier talks with the new governor-general, Changlin, and some minor local abuses were addressed. The embassy sailed from Macao in March 1794 and reached Britain in September 1794. The total cost was in the region of £78,000 to £80,000, a large sum borne by the East India Company.

Key people

George Macartney (1737–1806), created Earl Macartney in 1794, was an Irish-born diplomat and colonial administrator. His private journal of the embassy, published in full in the twentieth century, is one of the best sources on the mission.

The Qianlong Emperor (1711–1799) had ruled since 1735 and was at the height of his prestige. His reign had seen the largest territorial expansion in Chinese history.

Sir George Leonard Staunton (1737–1801) wrote the official account of the embassy, published in 1797. His son George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859) became a leading British expert on China and translated the Qing legal code.

Heshen (1750–1799), the emperor’s powerful favourite and chief minister, handled the embassy at court. He was forced to commit suicide soon after Qianlong’s death.

Myths and facts

Myth: The embassy failed only because Macartney refused to kowtow. The court’s rejection of the British requests followed from long-standing Qing policy on foreign trade and envoys. Even a full kowtow would almost certainly not have won a permanent embassy or new ports.

Myth: China showed no interest in British science. The emperor had long collected European clocks and instruments, and court officials examined the gifts. The court simply did not accept the political message that the gifts were meant to carry.

Myth: The famous cartoon shows the real audience. James Gillray’s satirical print of the reception at the Chinese court was published in September 1792, before the embassy had even sailed, and was imagined rather than observed.

Timeline

• 1757: The Qing restrict European trade to Canton.
• 1788: Cathcart’s planned embassy ends with his death at sea.
• 1792, September: Macartney sails from Portsmouth aboard HMS Lion.
• 1793, August: The embassy lands near Tianjin and travels to Beijing.
• 1793, 14 September: Macartney’s audience with the Qianlong Emperor at Chengde.
• 1793, early October: The emperor’s edicts to George III reject the British requests.
• 1793, 7 October: The embassy leaves Beijing for Canton.
• 1794, September: Macartney returns to Britain.
• 1816: The Amherst embassy fails after a new dispute over the kowtow.

Legacy

The embassy’s members published a flood of books and images. Staunton’s official account, Barrow’s Travels in China and William Alexander’s drawings gave Europeans their most detailed picture yet of China. Many of them stressed military weakness and stagnation, an image that shaped later British attitudes.

Macartney himself compared the Qing Empire in his journal to “an old, crazy, first-rate man-of-war”, impressive in appearance but poorly maintained. Britain’s frustrations over trade grew in the following decades, and after the failure of the Amherst embassy in 1816 they fed into the confrontation that became the First Opium War.

In the twentieth century the episode became a classic case study of a “clash of civilisations”. The French writer Alain Peyrefitte presented it as the meeting of an immobile empire with a modernising West. Later historians such as James Hevia argued that both sides acted rationally within their own diplomatic systems, and that the encounter should not be reduced to Chinese arrogance.

Why it matters

The Macartney Embassy was the first serious attempt to put relations between Britain and China on a modern diplomatic footing. Its failure showed that the Qing court under the Qianlong Emperor would not easily abandon its world order. The questions it raised, about trade, equality between states and access to China, were settled half a century later by war rather than negotiation.