Pacific overtures rejected
Philip Glazebrook
THE COLLISION OF TWO CIVILISATIONS: THE BRITISH EXPEDITION TO CHINA, 1792-4 by Main Peyrefitte
Harvill, £20, pp. 630 This absorbing book gives a moment-by- moment account of what its author calls 'a failed rendez-vous of history': Lord Macartney's embassy to China in 1792-4, that collision of Europe with the Orient which might have led to China becoming part of the progressive Western world of the 19th century, much as Russia, 100 years earlier, had been compelled by Peter the Great to face Europe instead of contem- plating its Asiatic navel. Macartney's object was to expand trade by including China's 330 millions amongst Britain's customers. China rebuffed his overtures. Main Peyre- fitte's book, as well as studying Macartney's side of the story, examines through newly available documents the Chinese govern- ment's response, the reaction of
an enormous organism preparing to manu- facture the antibodies with which to repel the foreign body that had dared to invade it.
Almost the Emperor's first step, taken six weeks before the embassy was to be received, was to write a letter rejecting all British proposals, whatever they might be. Thus Qianlong chose the path of the Ottoman sultans into self-absorbed Byzan- tine collapse, hastened by losing successive wars against European powers, rather than the path by which Peter the Great put Russia on the victor's side at Waterloo. His experience of modern China allows M. Peyrefitte to interject comments show- ing that whatever wars and revolutions China has suffered, she retains today a form of government, and habits of mind, which would make Communist China at once recognisable to these 18th-century Europeans confronted by Manchu abso- lutism. To this commentary he adds anoth- er, reminding the reader of France's descent, in the early 1790s, from the draw- ing-room theorising of les philosopher into the barbarism of the Terror. In this context the main narrative is framed, and, fortu- nately, there exist copious sources for the book's main narrative of the expedition. As well as by Macartney himself and by his second-in-command, Staunton, journals were kept by a painter, a valet, a mathe- matician, a soldier, and by a tutor and his 12-year-old charge, Staunton's son, the only member of the party to learn enough Chinese to speak directly to the Emperor. In these accounts we hear the clear, forthright language of the men of the Enlightenment setting down views formed by the enquiry and reflection of minds alive with curiosity on every subject. It is marvel- lous reading. Opposed to their lucidity behind the bamboo curtain we hear the murmurs and giggles of the mandarins, `the chuckling of poultry rather than the lan- guage of men', and we may read the igno- rance and prejudice contained in the Emperor's own crimson-ink comments upon the reports of his trembling and deceitful officials. Seen thus from both sides, we have a historical masterview of the event.
In a recent shorter book on the same subject, Aubrey Singer succeeded in bring- ing to life the figures of the embassy — Dinwiddie, the grumpy mathematician, for instance — in a way that made them mem- orable as individuals. This Peyrefitte does not achieve, deploying their journals as his- torical sources rather than as the raw mate- rial for character-sketches. Indeed he seems not to care for them much as men, at times inclined to take the Chinese and their civilisation at their own evaluation, and ready to giggle with the mandarins at the 'barbarian tributary' for ignorance of what Macartney cannot possibly have known. He is always quick, too, to give Hi, Honey, Shhh, I'm home!' credence to the 12-year-old's journal if it discredits a grown-up's account: in the matter of Macartney's avoidance of per- forming the kow-tow, for instance, Peyre- fitte insists on interpreting a word or two of the child's as endorsing a highly improba- ble version of the event, that Macartney bowed his knee nine times instead of mak- ing the single genuflection indicated in all other accounts. Nor does Peyrefitte seem to recognise that Macartney, having gov- erned Madras, knew well that British pres- tige in India would not long survive if Britain became known in the Orient as the tributary vassal of China.
Nevertheless, Macartney emerges as a figure of striking distinction. Saved from Eurocentricity by having served in Russia as well as India, full of confidence in the persuasive powers both of reason and of those progressive inventions with which his embassy was freighted, this 'penetrating and far-sighted thinker' had sailed for Peking with evangelical zeal. But China was a mudbank fronting a swamp, and in it his embassy stuck fast. Here was a civilisa- tion which denied the real proportions of the globe because such facts did not agree with Chinese self-esteem, a bureaucracy `mired in immobility' which in all fields insisted on its 'ethnic truths' which falsified evidence in order to bolster the selfish corruption of the status quo. 'Better to have no good astronomy', they declared, `than to have Westerners in China'. No doubt individual mandarins became attached privately to the 'barbarians' and understood through them the merits of the West; but all of them, crippled by fear, wore a public mask of condescension to the British when they turned to address the Emperor. He too, Qianlong, maintained towards his cringing officials the fiction that Macartney was a 'tributary legate', yet the apprehension with which he watched the British, and his eagerness to steer them out of China without provoking retaliation, shows us his true assessment of Europe's potential.
Qianlong's rejection of the embassy put China on a course which led to her defeat and exploitation by Europeans far less scrupulous than Macartney. This subse- quent history might be expressed in one anecdote: after the sack of the Summer Palace in 1860 — that symbolic violation of China by Europe — cannon presented by Macartney were found unfired, stored away by Chinese too high-and-mighty to have enquired of a European how to work them. Guns and trade, partnership in Macartney's idea of progress: China rejected them, and, for 100 years or more, paid the price. The corollary which might surprise Macartney (and Peter the Great too) is that China remains today the withdrawn monolith of the Manchu empire, whilst the British and Russian empires have dissolved. The idea of progress, with which that embassy was charged, was to prove a fallacy of the Enlightenment after all.
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